For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of February 14-16, 2025):

1 (new) Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy (15) **

2 (new) Captain America: Brave New World (12A)

3 (1) Dog Man (U)

4 (new) Heart Eyes (18) **

5 (3) Mufasa: The Lion King (PG)

6 (2) A Complete Unknown (15) **

7 (7) Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (PG)

8 (new) Chhaava (15) **

9 (6) The Brutalist (18) ***

10 (5) September 5 (15) **

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Picnic at Hanging Rock

2. Rockstar

3. The Seed of the Sacred Fig

4. I'm Still Here

5. Memoir of a Snail

 

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (new) Paddington in Peru (PG)

2 (1) Moana 2 (U) ***

3 (3) Wicked: Part 1 (PG) **

4 (10) Conclave (12) ****

5 (2) Venom: The Last Dance (15)

6 (4) Nosferatu (15) ***

7 (25) Bridget Jones's Diary (15) *

8 (5) Gladiator II (15) ***

9 (24) Bridget Jones's Baby (15) **

10 (7) The Wild Robot (U) **

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Speak No Evil

2. Juror #2

3. The Room Next Door

4. Small Things Like These

5. The Apprentice

My top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. All the President's Men [above] (Sunday, BBC Two, 10pm)

2. Clemency (Tuesday, BBC Two, 11.05pm)

3. Passport to Pimlico (Saturday, BBC Two, 2.20pm)

4. Ema (Wednesday, Channel 4, 1am)

5. The Banshees of Inisherin (Saturday, Channel 4, 9.15pm)

Stranger things: "Picnic at Hanging Rock" at 50

1975's Picnic at Hanging Rock reaches fifty, and its mysteries endure. Maybe even intensify: this reissue is the first time the film has played in UK cinemas with a 12A rather than PG certificate, a consequence of some racial language that wasn't picked up on first release, and possibly the fact we're getting the shorter Director's Cut, only enhancing the prevailing air of spookiness. (Whole scenes and sequences have vanished into the ether.) This was Peter Weir, at the outset of that Australian New Wave that gave us the films of Bruce Beresford and George Miller and Gillian Armstrong and Jane Campion, attempting to upend the costume drama and all its attendant certainties and complacencies in filming Joan Lindsay's non-fictional novel of 1967 about a trio of schoolgirls who go missing on Valentine's Day 1900 during an excursion to the striking outcrop of the title. We've all been thinking a lot about David Lynch these past few weeks, and you can't help but wonder whether he saw this widely circulated film at a formative moment in his directorial career. Picnic opens by paraphrasing Poe ("all that we see is but a dream within a dream"), and that dreaminess is exactly how Weir films this book: in gauzy, half-remembered images - a human caterpillar of sylphs lacing up one another's corsets, bodies hanging out of holes in caves - set to the kind of Gheorghe Zamfir panpipes that were just beginning to pierce Western consciousness. The raw material is Victorian formality and decorum. "As the day is warm," headmistress Rachel Roberts informs the girls before departure, "you will be permitted to remove your gloves once we have passed through Woodend". But we're invited to watch as that rationale is exposed by sunlight as impotent, meaningless and ridiculous, yet more silly rules our ancestors made for themselves.

As in Lynch's work, we're not meant to solve the mystery so much as contemplate it, though inevitably everyone will have their theories. (5/1 some sort of St. Valentine's Day massacre; 11/2 the girls, overwhelmed by adolescent passion, liberated themselves like aliens returning to their home planet. Stranger things have happened.) The film is most effective as an exercise in languorous atmosphere - immersive cinema before anyone thought to arrive at that specific formulation. Weir and cinematographer Russell Boyd allow us to both see and feel the heat and hear every last bug chirruping in the eerie silence after the girls go AWOL, while endowing us with a heightened, quasi-architectural sense of the sternly indifferent, often plain forbidding rock everybody runs into like a black brick wall, an organic variation on Kubrick's 2001 monolith. Yet Weir identifies a secondary site of interest: the people in this story, and the mysteries they too contain. Young men look at young women, not knowing what to make of them; the schoolgirls look at one another, attempting to figure themselves out; the adults entrusted with their care wrestle with grief, obsession, regret and suspicion they can't fully process. There may be nothing more mysterious here than the sight of life going on as quote-unquote normal: the survivors getting older and ghostlier, chained to this past, while the missing girls apparently remain the same age they always were. There is something unnatural going on of which we're never made aware, and which likewise lies beyond the characters' grasp. What year is this? Weir would go on to work with more assured performers - a slight liability: the young and inexperienced cast - but it actually benefits Picnic that nothing is fully nailed down or tied up: it's seemed like a completely different film every time I've seen it, as my own experiences align with a different generation of characters. A half-century on, it presents less like history than a premonition of what was to come, both from the Australian screen industries (among the chaperones: Vivean Gray, later Neighbours' Mrs. Mangel, already as weathered as Hanging Rock itself) and from Weir, pushing onwards into the metaphysical, before the movies grew uninterested in such matters.

Picnic at Hanging Rock returns to selected cinemas tomorrow.

Horror-slash-romcom: "Heart Eyes"

Josh Ruben's novelty horror item Heart Eyes owes its existence to two factors: one, the studios looking to expand the run of date-specific genre films kickstarted by the modestly profitable Thanksgiving and Violent Night; and two, Valentine's Day happened to fall over an opening weekend in 2025. Ruben and a small unit of writers (notably Happy Death Day's Christopher Landon) offer a comic slasher organised around a loveless ghoul who uses the 24 hours of February 14 to carry out his own personal purge on couples, cutting short a countryside proposal in the prologue by firing Cupid's arrow through the skull of the groom-never-to-be and pursuing the latter's sweetheart into a winery's pulping machine. Thereafter, it's an exercise in trying to square the distinct YA audiences for horror and the romcom. It gets gory - indeed, 18-rated gory - with knowing references to earlier slasher landmarks; but then much of the blood gets splashed over Nancy Meyers-like aspirational interiors, the soundtrack harbours Train and David Gray (be very afraid), and we're set to watching a relationship growing between cynical junior advertising exec Ally (Olivia Holt), subject of an early makeover sequence, and her altogether smiley office rival Jay (Mason Gooding), our responses thereafter alternating between awws and ewws.

It's likely Paramount identified this as a potential franchise to run alongside the Scream reboots (in which Gooding featured), but at this point the studio isn't exactly committed: the budget's on the lower side, the shoot's been farmed out to New Zealand passing for Seattle, and crucially we're short on familiar faces, which results in last-reel bathos as the killer is unmasked as a character you've barely registered played by some rando you half-remember from something else. It's no Scream; it's barely a gasp. Minor pleasures include Michaela Watkins, attempting a cross between Dolly Parton and Cruella de Vil as Ally's most demanding client; the likable leads are functional stand-ins for the intended audience, although it's telling that when the killer targets a drive-in around the halfway point, the eyes are most forcefully drawn to Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday, real stars in a proper movie, as opposed to something as throwaway and frankly as straight-to-streaming as Heart Eyes looks. Watchable enough in the way a two-part monster-of-the-week TV episode would be, but also clinching proof that the horror bar has been raised significantly elsewhere in recent months: there's a lot of artificial sweetener in this ketchup, leaving it more successful as an undemanding date movie than it is as a scary movie.

Heart Eyes is now playing in selected cinemas.

State of siege: "The Seed of the Sacred Fig"

Here are six words you don't see very often in a movie's opening credits: "This film was made in secret." Iranian cinema's elder statesman Jafar Panahi, who may still have goodwill banked somewhere for having helped to bring his country to the world's attention, has been granted some small measure of room to manoeuvre in his recent, largely clandestine endeavours. No such leeway has been extended to the next-gen writer-director Mohammad Rasoulof, who in the past fifteen years has been sentenced to prison time and flogging, and had his passport seized, by the Iranian authorities. His latest The Seed of the Sacred Fig, a Cannes 2024 prizewinner that finds itself up against the likes of Emilia Pérez and I'm Still Here for this year's Best International Feature Oscar, had to be directed remotely, lest Rasoulof be arrested - the exact situation Panahi dramatised in 2022's No Bears - though this curious circumstance only ever enhances our understanding of what the new film is really, deep down, about: entrapment. As we find him, protagonist Iman (Missagh Zareh, who handily resembles Bob Hoskins or an angry bear depending on where he is in the plot) is being handed first a promotion to the standing of investigating judge, then a loaded gun. On one hand, it's cause for celebration: wife Najmeh (Soheila Golestani) speculates they'll now be able to relocate to a three-bedroom property, liberating the couple's bunked-up college-age daughters Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and Sana (Setareh Maleki). On the other, there is cause for concern: the gun is to ward off anyone seeking retribution on the judge or his family. More bad news: when Iman reports to his office, he discovers his job is merely to sign off on those verdicts handed down to him by his superiors. (The "investigating" part of his job description, much like any trial, is solely for show.) And Iman has been absorbed so far inside the State that certain conditions now apply: his daughters, who've displayed troubling signs of modernity (nail polish, talk of hairdye, pals with progressive views), must now comport themselves accordingly. "It's a phase," Dad shrugs, insisting the imminent return to school will see the girls right. But rebellion is brewing, both within this house and on the streets outside.

It's not long before you spot just what a dangerous game Rasoulof is playing here. The wily Panahi set No Bears on the very fringes of Iranian society - close enough to the border to escape, should he have need - while ensuring that everything from title to narrative was left open to interpretation. (Though only the most blinkered of fools would fail to see where he was coming from.) Rasoulof, by contrast, is operating in the very heart of Tehran, clearly targeting his drama at those functionaries who may still have the odd flicker of conscience about the work they carry out for the regime on a daily basis. It's not just that Iman's actions tear the lives of others apart; they also tear his family apart, and finally ensure his own downfall, too. For any state to function like this, Rasoulof posits, its functionaries have either to sign off on tyranny or turn a blind eye to it. The Seed of the Sacred Fig isn't solely content to deploy dramatic licence, in this respect. Rasoulof also works in footage of the Iranian state's clampdown on actual protests: violent, bloody and shocking, these clips are shared surreptitiously by Rezvan and Sana on social media while their folks watch the official party line being parroted on the nightly news. Everything gets brought closer and closer to home: it's one thing for a dissident filmmaker to invent an entirely fictional scenario to illustrate the terrors of the State, quite another to cite actual names and cases, and then find the video evidence that backs your argument up. The whole endeavour could have seemed one-sided, a hectoring screed; instead, for much of its duration, Rasoulof's film pulls off that very Iranian trick of being so credibly naturalistic it becomes actively involving and then unexpectedly thrilling. Indeed, so completely are we caught up in The Seed of the Sacred Fig as a thriller that there are points we might start to forget the actual Revolutionary Guard could storm these locations at any moment and lead everyone away in shackles, like the police at the end of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Is that why Rasoulof's film has been trailered just about everywhere? I've seen the promo not just in the usual arthouses, but in my local multiplex ahead of Nosferatu, and in another multiplex before the Bollywood drama Sky Force (a tad ironic, given that film's intended audience of flag-waving statists). Lionsgate have clearly had ambitious plans for this acquisition, and if bookings have proven steady rather than stellar (the film itself has showed up at neither multiplex so far), that may owe less to any perceived shortfall in quality or commercial appeal than to a seasonally competitive marketplace (all these awards contenders to get through) and a tricky running time to schedule. The movie is long at two hours 47 minutes, but Rasoulof does something constructive with that length, pinning down the basic facts of the situation and then allowing himself to develop the drama at a realistic pace, adding telling, sometimes killer details, and fleshing these characters out beyond the social perspectives they each represent. Zareh's Iman isn't automatically a bad man - he's devout and conscientious, working all hours of the day (and increasingly late into the night as the protests mount) so as to keep a protective roof over his loved ones' heads; even at a late stage in the plot, within a house already vocally divided, he wistfully expresses a desire to hug and kiss the daughters who rile him so. But for a long while, he doesn't have to suffer the consequences of the regime's actions - of his own actions - in the same way his wife and children do. Similarly, Golestani's Najmeh initially strikes the Western eye as something of a trad wife, trying to hold the family together in the vain hope they might one day enjoy the benefits of her husband's promotion; yet she does care for her daughters, and her daughters' friends, and has her beliefs visibly rattled by what she sees and experiences. These feel like real, flesh-and-blood people, entering dire straits within the wider tight spot that is the Islamic Republic of Iran; even when they flee their home at a critical juncture, there is no easy escape.

Here, in its final movement, Rasoulof's film hits a stretch of rougher road, lurching so completely into conventional thriller territory - with high-speed car chases, life-or-death games of hide-and-seek and the hogtying of minor characters - that you may begin to wonder whether the burden of directing had been delegated to Renny Harlin instead. This closing act is steadied to some degree by the performers, no matter that at least one of them now seems to be playing a markedly different character, and even here Rasoulof alights upon fascinating, resonant ideas. (Not least sending everybody on screen back in time as some mullahs would presumably like, first into a storeroom filled to the rafters with forbidden pre-Revolutionary material, then a dusty network of disinterred palaces and caves.) Yet I started to long for a bit more of Panahi's cool control: it feels vaguely perverse that this production should start getting panicky as it leaves Tehran in its rear-view mirror (you find yourself wondering: did somebody's cover get blown?), and you can hear Rasoulof cranking up the volume - literally so, at one point - so as to ensure his message will reach Western ears. The film is really good, perhaps even the strongest of all this year's Oscar nominees, then merely very good, but it's always impressively brave: written and directed within rigorously policed enemy territory, acted to the hilt by performers who had to have realised the full implications of what they were playing. (Even the make-up artists, called into action for a sequence more viscerally affecting than anything in the ever-more-silly-seeming The Substance, could surely have found themselves being carted away and accused of treachery.) It's never much of an escape from real-world 2025, granted, but throughout we sense the possibility of tyranny everywhere we look - in large part because Rasoulof knows firsthand how it creeps into our heads, our homes and our hearts. One of the most important functions of any camera - now more than ever? - is bearing witness. However they were moved into these positions, from wherever the cry of "action" went up, Rasoulof's cameras did that with a gravity and urgency you hope even a hardline investigating judge could come to admire - even if only in secret. 

The Seed of the Sacred Fig is now playing in selected cinemas.

Coming out of her shell: "Memoir of a Snail"

If only as an indicator of the Academy's collective mental health at the start of 2025, consider this year's Best Animated Feature category. Three of the five nominated titles are digimations, one broadly optimistic about humanity's ability to survive crisis and change (the Disney-released Inside Out 2, inevitably), two flatly despairing (The Wild Robot, Flow). The other two contenders showcase stopmotion, though even here a choice presents. On the cheery front, there is, of course, Aardman's Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl. And then there's Memoir of a Snail, which follows in the depressively droll (or drolly depressive) lineage of Australian writer-director Adam Elliot's previous Harvie Krumpet, an Oscar winner for Best Animated Short in 2004, and Mary and Max. Where Nick Park folds his plasticine into the shape of eccentric Northern boffins who may or may not resemble a roundabout self-portrait, Elliot has an enduring fondness for marginalised figures poked, prodded and occasionally flattened by life, which makes claymation the ideal medium for him to be working in: it allows us to more tangibly feel, sometimes even see, the fickle fingers of fate digging into his characters, and the cracks of despair, sorrow and grief opening up in their wake. Elliot's new movie, which not untypically commences with a withered crone's dying breath, forms an extended study of one Grace Pudel (pronounced Puddle, possibly after Hyacinth Bucket), a snail-obsessed misfit with a hairlip whose mother died during childhood and whose father passed soon after. We find Grace (voiced by Sarah Snook) in her late friend's vegetable garden, narrating the story of her rough childhood licking batteries and suchlike with delinquent twin brother Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee), a creation who resembles Bart Simpson redrawn by The Cure's Robert Smith. Grace's onscreen audience is her favourite snail Sylvia, named after Ms. Plath. All that should give you some idea of the issues in play here, and also the prevailing outlook. I'm not saying that Elliot has a gloomy disposition, but when Gilbert declares early on (of the snail-shaped ring gifted to him by his sis) "I'm going to wear this until the day I die", you do worry how much longer the tyke can be for this world.

The salvation of Elliot's films has always been that they're so comfortable, even relaxed around our damnation that they become mordantly funny. I'd lay good money that one formative influence on this career was Tim Burton, though Elliot strides even further into the mire than Burton has publicly. One of young Gracie's pals is a homeless man sacked from his previous position of magistrate after admitting to compulsively masturbating during trials. Grace's father, a sometime street performer in Paris, is reduced to working the rough-edged Melbourne suburb of Brunswick; one gig there is preceded by a very Australian heckle of "wanker!", and dad is subsequently run over by a truck. If you don't subscribe to the "life's hard, and then you die" worldview, this could well seem gruelling, a series of episodic variations on the same grim theme. (Such is life, the pessimists say.) There are points in the second half where you sense the misery clotting, resulting in a film that feels some way longer and denser than its stated 94 minutes. The consolation, which is considerable, is that Elliot's modelling has become only more ambitious, which in turn allows fresh air and sunshine to penetrate the overall cloud cover. The animator's earlier projects unfurled around cramped sets, tactically underlit to conceal any budgetary constraints, but here he really is extending himself, building worlds: funfairs, Paris, The Two Ronnies on the telly, various unsuitable foster homes (not least a swingers' hub and a cult complex), a self-assembled crazy golf course, and a setpiece with John Denver and a helicopter ("Take me home, country roads!") which does much in itself to explain the kid-unfriendly rating. Most cheeringly, he's broadened his palette without any attendant loss of character or detail. Note how Grace's mumpy Jack Skellington face illuminates when presented with an engagement ring attached to a chipolata, and the casting of Nick Cave as a horny postman; you can't fail to miss the minor miracle of the final movement, which is all the more moving for arriving at such hard-won happiness. As with life, sometimes you need to push on through: this is one of those endings that redeems a few earlier wobbles, and Elliot tops it with a seven-word statement of ChatGPT-era defiance tucked away at the very end of his closing credits: "This film was made by human beings." I mean it as a compliment when I say that it feels like it.

Memoir of a Snail is now playing in selected cinemas.

Progressions: "I'm Still Here"

The new Walter Salles film, I'm Still Here, has the feel of a lockdown pet project not unlike Spielberg's The Fabelmans: popular history, a return to the moment of the filmmaker's youth, an attempt to evoke through domestic detail what it was to live in a particular place at a particular time. The difference is that instead of the relatively carefree and liberal-minded West Coast of the 1950s, Salles is revisiting his native Brazil as it was in 1970, under military dictatorship. Meet the Paivas: a large, well-to-do (real-life) family, living visibly untouched by the ways of this world in a spacious ocean-facing property in Rio as the decade begins. Junior clan members hang out at the beach, adopting a dog that wanders onto court during a volleyball game. Dad Rubens (Selton Mello), a former congressman now working as an architect, busies himself with blueprints for a new Brazil in his study. His wife Eunice (Fernanda Torres) leaves the domestics running this household to express mild concern about the eldest of her especially beauteous daughters drifting into student politics. It's all sun and fun, for the most part: period 45s on the record player, Kodachrome recreations of back-garden home videos. Then, having drawn us into this world and these lives with great skill, Salles allows us to feel the rupture when men with guns show up at the family's front door, and proceed to redirect everybody into another film altogether.

I'm Still Here's quiet strength is that, even deep into its final reel, it keeps moving forwards in this way. That initial portrait of haute-bourgeois complacency shades into a tense sketch of a house under siege, the doors and curtains that once let the sunshine in suddenly, definitively closed. Expansive familial togetherness - the fond observation of life around the breakfast table - is overtaken by a mounting sense of division, enforced solitude and private grief. From an ensemble piece, the film develops into a character study centred on Eunice, a moneyed woman forced into the position of becoming first a political prisoner, then a seeker of justice as her husband is disappeared for reasons unknown. Already much-nominated (and sometimes garlanded) this awards season, Torres gives the kind of performance you often see holding not just movies but entire families together, and yet Salles permits her, too, room to move: to progress beyond the loftiness of a society dame to something rueful yet resilient, a Mother Courage obliged to track her husband while simultaneously picking her kids up from school. Here, the film begins to settle closer to the arthouse centreground, but it's always absorbing and involving: it aces the period detail, and Salles ensures all the kids - and even those cast for one or two scenes as thugs or jailers - have a distinct personality, even as he turns his attention to the bigger political picture. Doubtless this is a Brazilian film that could only have been made with the social changes of the last few years, and the defiance in that title extends beyond that of the characters: Salles counters the horrors of the State with basic humanity, and shows that resistance is often a matter of pressing on, of living and growing in the face of those who would oppress you. Subtly, without making undue fuss, I'm Still Here enters into conversation with events north of the border heading into 2025.

I'm Still Here opens in selected cinemas from Friday.

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.