| 1 | Name: | Mr. Woody Allen | |
| Year Elected: | 2010 | ||
| Class: | 5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs | ||
| Subdivision: | 501. Creative Artists | ||
| Residency: | Resident | ||
| Living? : | Living | ||
| Birth Date: | 1935 | ||
In a career spanning nearly five decades and three dozen films, Woody Allen has established himself as one of the major auteurs of contemporary international cinema, with a comic voice that is distinctively twentieth-century American-jokey, anxious, unmistakably New York-and a moral and aesthetic vision that owes much to the filmmaker’s immersion in the great classics of European literature and cinema. Having established his comic bona fides with early works from Play It Again, Sam (an early foray into magical realism) to his paranoid futuristic fantasy Sleeper, Allen came into his own as a serious artist, with a special talent for depicting wry romantic disappointment in the context of American subcultural conflicts, in films such as his Oscar-winning Annie Hall and Manhattan. A series of marvelously rich tragicomedies of the 1980s, tinged with distinctively Continental colors and experimenting with great success with magical realism and metafictionality as technical means of exploring his perennial interest in the relationships between eros, art, and morality, includes The Purple Rose of Cairo, Crimes and Misdemeanors and Alice-an evolution that has been capped, in more recent years, by such acclaimed later works as Match Point and Vicky Christina Barcelona. His recent films include Midnight in Paris (2011) and Blue Jasmine (2013). In 2014 he was awarded the Cecil B. DeMille Lifetime Achievement Award. | |||