Tony Roberts, the affable actor who was best known as the hero’s best friend in Woody Allen movies like “Annie Hall,” and who distinguished himself on the New York stage with two Tony Award nominations and what the critic Clive Barnes of The New York Times called his “careful nonchalance,” died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 85.
His daughter and only immediate survivor, Nicole Burley, said the cause was complications of lung cancer.
Mr. Roberts played easygoing, confident characters that were a perfect counterpoint to the rampant insecurities of Mr. Allen’s.
Alvy Singer, the hero of “Annie Hall” (1977), which won the Oscar for best picture, stuttered, dithered and fumbled his way around Manhattan’s Upper East Side alongside Rob (Mr. Roberts), his taller, better-looking, far more self-assured Hollywood actor friend and tennis partner. If truth be told, Rob would rather be in Los Angeles, where the weather is nicer, adding a laugh track to his sitcom.
Mr. Roberts played similar types in other Allen films. In “A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy” (1982), he was a jovial bachelor doctor at the turn of the 20th century. “Marriage, for me, is the death of hope,” his character announced. In “Stardust Memories” (1980), he was a brash actor who brought a Playboy centerfold model to a film festival.
In “Hannah and Her Sisters” (1986), Mr. Roberts was the effortlessly cool former business partner who donated sperm — clearly too flattered by the request to say no — giving an infertile man and his wife (Mr. Allen and his real-life partner at the time, Mia Farrow) fair-haired twin boys.
Mr. Roberts allowed, however, that there could be a downside to being too closely associated with Mr. Allen. “I was always so vividly the guy Woody wrote, that everybody in the business — casting agents, for instance — would think of me that way,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1997. “The persona I was for Woody is a hard thing to break out of.”
His first movie with Mr. Allen was the comedy “Play It Again, Sam” (1972), written by Mr. Allen but directed by Herbert Ross. Mr. Roberts played a businessman who had had “the foresight to buy Polaroid at 8 1/2” but is too busy to notice that his wife (Diane Keaton) is starving for attention.
“Play It Again, Sam” began on the Broadway stage in 1969, with Mr. Roberts, Mr. Allen and Ms. Keaton (and Jerry Lacy as the spirit of Humphrey Bogart) all playing the roles they would play on film. Despite faint-praise reviews, the show ran for more than a year, and Mr. Roberts received a Tony Award nomination for best featured actor in a play.
He had already been nominated for a Tony the year before, for best actor in a musical, for his performance in “How Now, Dow Jones.” Mr. Barnes of The Times hated the show, a musical comedy about a Wall Street romance, but loved Mr. Roberts, whom he described as a “bundle of talent” with “an aggressively untamed terrier face and eyebrows with independent suspension.”
That was an improvement over what another Times critic, Walter Kerr, had said of an earlier Roberts performance in “Don’t Drink the Water” (1966), a comedy about an ambassador’s son with serious behavior problems. It was Mr. Roberts’s first collaboration with Mr. Allen, who wrote it. “Mildly engaging,” Mr. Kerr shrugged.
The stage was a welcoming home for Mr. Roberts, decade after decade. There was London, where he starred with Betty Buckley in the musical “Promises, Promises” (1969). There was regional theater, where he appeared in “Follies” (1998) at the Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey. And there was Broadway, where he took on some two dozen roles, mostly comic and musical.
He was praised as “urbanely foolish” by Mr. Barnes when he played a downwardly mobile architect in Alan Ayckbourn’s comedy “Absurd Person Singular” (1974). He was a theater critic in a 1986 revival of “Arsenic and Old Lace” and a retired Upper West Side doctor and annoyingly noble husband in Charles Busch’s “The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife” (2000). Ben Brantley of The Times, reviewing that play, called Mr. Roberts “an expert in resonant underplaying.”
Mr. Roberts had earlier been a stockbroker accused of insider trading in “Doubles” (1985), a comic drama about midlife crises at a Connecticut tennis club. Diving deep into drama, he played the compassionate Dr. Dorn in Chekhov’s “The Seagull” (1992).
And when Julie Andrews returned to Broadway in “Victor/Victoria” (1995), he was at her side, as the mastermind nightclub M.C. Variety called his performance “strikingly smooth and uncampy, if also somewhat bland.”
Mr. Roberts, who caught the acting bug as a child, had an almost psychoanalytical understanding of what motivates people to take the stage or perform for the camera.
“The desire to hold the center of the stage or command the room shows up in people when they’re 8 or 9,” he told The Chicago Sun-Times in 2015, “because people are either not paying enough attention to you or too much attention to you.”
David Anthony Roberts was born on Oct. 22, 1939, in Manhattan to Ken Roberts, a popular radio announcer who was born Saul Trochman, and Norma (Finkelstein) Roberts, an assistant to a film producer and animator.
His father first suspected that his son might be headed for the stage when he noticed him listening raptly to Laurence Olivier as Shakespeare’s Henry V on the radio at the age of 4. “I’d never seen a child so fascinated by the sound and the words coming from the radio,” the elder Mr. Roberts told The Daily News in 1996. “We couldn’t drag him away.”
David, as he was called at first, attended the High School of Music & Art in Manhattan (now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and the Performing Arts) and studied acting at Northwestern University in Illinois, where his classmates included Richard Benjamin, Paula Prentiss and Karen Black. The college was recommended to him by a Fire Island summer neighbor of the family’s who, back in the city, had taught acting: Lee Strasberg,
Mr. Roberts graduated in 1961 and made his Broadway debut in 1962 in the play “Something About a Soldier.” Because there was another David Roberts in Actors’ Equity, he became Anthony Roberts and stuck with that name for a decade or so, before switching to the more casual Tony.
“It’s difficult for me to characterize myself,” he told The Times in 1989. “I probably have some kind of urbane street-smart wisdom that comes from the New York public school system, my greatest teacher.”
In 1965, he replaced Robert Redford as the cautious young newlywed in Neil Simon’s hit comedy “Barefoot in the Park.” That sort of thing became a habit.
He took over for Robert Klein as a composer in love with his lyricist in “They’re Playing Our Song” (1979) and as a witty faux-furrier in “The Sisters Rosensweig” (1994). He replaced Ron Rifkin as Herr Schultz, the bashful Jewish boarder, in a revival of “Cabaret” (2003). And he was able to return to “Barefoot in the Park” in a 2006 revival, this time as Victor Velasco, the newlyweds’ debonair upstairs neighbor.
Before he became Woody Allen’s best movie friend, he was Dean Jones’s in Disney’s “The Million Dollar Duck” (1971), his film debut.
Mr. Roberts was Al Pacino’s politically savvy fellow police officer in “Serpico” (1973). In “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three” (1974), he was a sensible deputy mayor dealing with subway hijackers and their ransom demands.
And in “Just Tell Me What You Want” (1980), he played the self-satisfied young head of a Hollywood studio.
His last Broadway appearance was in 2009, in “The Royal Family,” playing Oscar Wolfe, the colorful producer of some colorful aristocrats of the theater. (His appearance in that production got off to a bumpy start when, at 69, he had a minor seizure onstage shortly after curtain time during a Sunday preview performance. He had to be escorted off the stage, and that day’s performance was canceled. But he rallied and later rejoined the cast.)
His final screen role was as Max Kellerman, a wistful Catskills resort owner, in a 2017 television movie version of “Dirty Dancing.”
Mr. Roberts married Jennifer Lyons, a dancer, in 1969. They divorced in 1975.
In an NBC interview recounted in his 2015 memoir, “Do You Know Me?,” a critic, impressed by — or concerned about — the number of television, movie and theater projects Mr. Roberts had going on, asked him if he ever took a vacation.
“No,” Mr. Roberts said. “I crack under leisure.”
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