In memoriam: Tony Roberts (Telegraph 14/02/25)

Tony Roberts, who has died aged 85, was a bounding stage and screen performer who achieved cinematic immortality with his performance as Rob, debonair actor-confidant to Woody Allen’s neurotic Alvy Singer in the Oscar-winning Annie Hall (1977). 

This double act took some while to click. Roberts had been cast in Allen’s 1966 play Don’t Drink the Water, but only after he’d auditioned four times and a reluctant Allen had been sent by producers to see the actor in Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park: “After the show one night, Woody walks in to my dressing room with his then-wife, Louise Lasser, and says, ‘You were great. How come you’re such a lousy auditioner?’ I still don’t have a good answer for that. But I got the part.” 

Professional relationship begat fully-fledged friendship after the pair worked on Allen’s 1969 stageplay Play It Again, Sam, where Roberts was Tony nominated for playing the cuckolded Dick Christie, and on Herbert Ross’s 1972 film adaptation, which reunited the original cast.

If Annie Hall’s Rob was set a low bar – to present as smoother than Allen’s worrywart – the tall, bearded and sporting Roberts effortlessly cleared it, suggesting a creative with broad shoulders and tricks up his sleeve besides: at one point, Rob adds canned laughter to his own show, much to Alvy’s horror. Writing in The New York Times, Christopher Isherwood felt Allen cast Roberts to “epitomise suave charm in contrast to his own hapless shrubbery”.

Further collaborations ensued. In Stardust Memories (1980), Roberts was the moustachioed, Playmate-dating Tony; in A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982), he was the patient-bedding doctor. He went uncredited in Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) as the former writing partner of Allen’s Mickey; cameoed as a gameshow host in Radio Days (1987); and returned for Sounds from a Town I Love (2001), a short Allen directed for a post-9/11 benefit concert.

Though Roberts worried about alpha-male typecasting, he delighted in offering his pal some perspective, off-camera as on. In a 2016 interview, he recalled being burgled while shooting Annie Hall: “[Woody] said, ‘Did they get the script?’ I said, ‘Who cares, you have a million [scripts] lying around.’ About a week later, they found it in a garbage pail a mile away. It was my pleasure to make him aware that [the thieves] thought the script was garbage.”

He was born David Anthony Roberts in Manhattan on October 22, 1939 to radio announcer Ken Roberts and his wife Norma (née Finkelstein), an assistant to Popeye cartoonist Ken Fleischer. He studied speech and theatre at Northwestern University before making his Broadway debut in 1962’s Take Her, She’s Mine.

Haphazardly called upon to replace Robert Redford’s understudy in Barefoot in the Park, he landed his first Tony nomination in 1968 for the musical comedy How Now, Dow Jones. Two hit musicals drawn from Billy Wilder comedies followed, 1968’s Promises Promises, derived from Wilder’s The Apartment (1960), and 1972’s Sugar, inspired by Some Like It Hot (1959).

Roberts’ film debut was Disney’s The Million Dollar Duck (1971), but more memorable projects ensued. He smoked joints with Al Pacino in Serpico (1973) and played New York’s deputy mayor in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974); briefly, he absconded to France, guesting in Jean-Paul Rappeneau’s hit comedy Le sauvage (Lovers Like Us, 1975) alongside Catherine Deneuve.

Dud horror Amityville 3-D (1983) sunk any leading man ambitions, but he found renewed success onstage: as the womanising Dr. Dorn in a 1992 revival of The Seagull; as Cornell Todd in the 1995 Broadway reworking of Victor/Victoria, alongside Julie Andrews; as Buddy in a 1998 revival of Sondheim’s Follies; and as Herr Schultz in a 2003 production of Cabaret.

Roberts’ final theatrical role was in a 2009 run of Kaufman and Ferber’s The Royal Family, which he completed after suffering a seizure during previews. He appeared several times (in several roles) in the various Law & Order franchises, before making a final screen appearance in the TV remake of Dirty Dancing (2017).

A 2015 memoir, Do You Know Me?, was titled for the way strangers recognised the actor without being able to place him – a very different kind of fame from Allen’s notoriety. Interviewed a year earlier, Roberts mulled how he now related to the man who helped make him so familiar: “There have been times when I wished I was him. I would like to have his gift and his genius and his brain… That’s a pleasure to be around. I wouldn’t want his deeper neuroses, but I don’t think he’d want mine.”

Roberts married Jennifer Lyons in 1969 before divorcing in 1975; he is survived by a daughter, Nicole Burley.

Tony Roberts, born October 22, 1939, died February 7, 2025.