“California, Max.” I could've listened to these guys forever.

I thought Tony Roberts was in every Woody Allen movie in the 1970s and not as much in the '80s but it's actually the other way around. He reprised his stage role in “Play It Again, Sam,” and played the wonderful Rob/Max in “Annie Hall,” and that's it for the '70s. But in the '80s? “Stardust Memories,” “A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy,” “Hannah and Her Sisters” and “Radio Days.” Maybe he loomed larger in the '70s because the roles were bigger, or because those '70s movies loomed larger for me. I do love his “Hannah” role—the family friend they go to for sperm when Woody's Mickey is diagnosed as sterile. The look of astonishment, honor and pride in his face, which Mickey then undercuts by reminding him he won't actually get to schtup Mia Farrow's Hannah, he'll just jerk off into a cup. Then the great joke later of all of their kids with Tony Roberts hair. Like a lot of Woody, it's the joke that later proved true. Witness son Ronan Farrow's shocking resemblance to Frank Sinatra. 

But it's Roberts' '70s roles that do it for me, particularly Rob, the great shallow friend of Alvy Singer, two men forever walking through New York and nonsensically calling each other “Max,” as apparently Woody and Tony did in real life. When Alvy complains about anti-Semitism (“Jew eat? Not did you eat but Jew eat?”), Max tells him he's paranoid. He also tells him “California, Max,” the promised land. “Oh, I did Shakespeare in the Park, Max. I got mugged.” He winds up doing TV sitcoms with laughttracks that aren't funny: “That's why this machine's dynamite.” He winds up being one of the weirdos he and Alvy used to poke fun at—going hazmat to keep out the sun's rays. 

Woody and Tony met on Broadway. Woody had a play that needed casting, probably “Don't Drink the Water,” and a producer suggested he go see Barefoot in the Park “with an actor who had taken over when Robert Redford left. [He] found Redford's replacement funny and an ideal Broadway romantic comedy leading man.” That was Tony Roberts. They didn't become friends/Maxes then; that was later, Woody says, when he cast him in “Play It Again, Sam”: first stage, then screen. Per Woody's memoir, Roberts was something of a ladies man, and he often cast him as such.

The rest of Tony Roberts' CV ain't no slouch, either, including “Serpico” and “The Taking of Pelham One, Two, Three.” The Times obit is good and thorough.

Roberts says one of “Annie Hall”'s most underrated and poignant lines. Annie, Alvy and Rob go back to the old neighborhood and are witness, via the magic of film, to a 1940s-era argument between Alvy's parents. At one point, Alvy says, not incorrectly, “You're both crazy,” to which Rob, solicitious, says to him, “They can't hear you, Max.” Gets me every time. 

Say hi to Chris for me, Max.