Woody Allen Trivia
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50 free Woody Allen trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Woody Allen trivia for film buffs, New Yorkers and anyone who can quote the lobster scene. The quiz starts with Allan Konigsberg of Midwood, Brooklyn, selling jokes to Broadway writers at 16, joining Sid Caesar's stable alongside Mel Brooks and Neil Simon, and finding his nebbish persona in Greenwich Village clubs, before turning to Take the Money and Run, Bananas, Sleeper and Love and Death. It then covers the films people actually argue about - Annie Hall and its four Oscars, Manhattan in black-and-white to Gershwin, Zelig, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Hannah and Her Sisters, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Husbands and Wives, Bullets Over Broadway, Match Point, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Midnight in Paris and Blue Jasmine - along with the record screenplay Oscars, the clarinet and the Carlyle, his three marriages and the Mia Farrow years, the Amazon series, the memoir, and his 50th and, he says, final film. Roughly a third of the questions are easy and the rest are for people who have seen Stardust Memories more than once. Every answer has been checked against a reference page and each question shows its source once you have answered.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What was Woody Allen's birth name?
Allan Stewart Konigsberg
Allan Stewart Konigsberg picked the name Woody Allen as a schoolboy sending one-liners to newspaper columnists.
Q 02Woody Allen grew up in Brooklyn, but in which New York City borough was he born?
The Bronx
The Bronx was only his birthplace: he was raised in Brooklyn's Midwood, where the future screen neurotic preferred sports and magic tricks to schoolwork.
Q 03Which blockbuster did Annie Hall beat to Best Picture at the 1978 Academy Awards?
Star Wars
Star Wars took six Oscars that night but lost Best Picture to Annie Hall, whose director did not even turn up: Allen declined to attend the ceremony and stayed in New York.
Q 04As of 2025, Allen holds the Oscar nominations record in which category?
Original screenplay
Original screenplay: he has 16 nominations and three wins in the category, yet he stayed away from the ceremony even on the nights Annie Hall and Midnight in Paris won him the prize.
Q 05Which psychiatric term was Allen's working title for Annie Hall?
Anhedonia
Anhedonia, the inability to feel pleasure, was the title Allen wanted; his co-writer countered with jokes such as It Had to Be Jew and A Rollercoaster Named Desire.
Q 06What is the name of Allen's character in Annie Hall, a comic picking over a failed relationship?
Alvy Singer
Alvy Singer talks straight to camera about the break-up; Allen denied the film was autobiography, though Diane Keaton's real surname is Hall and Annie was her nickname.
Q 07Which thinker steps out from behind a poster in Annie Hall to rebuke a man in a cinema queue?
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan was only the third choice for the cameo, after Federico Fellini and Luis Buñuel; he steps out to tell the bore in the queue, 'You know nothing of my work.'
Q 08Which cinematographer shot Annie Hall, the first of his eight films with Allen?
Gordon Willis
Gordon Willis was nicknamed 'the Prince of Darkness' for the shadows of The Godfather, yet neither that film nor Annie Hall, both Best Picture winners, brought him even an Oscar nomination.
Q 09Which composer's music scores Allen's 1979 film Manhattan, from its opening skyline montage onward?
George Gershwin
George Gershwin is named in the opening voice-over, which says New York 'pulsated to the great tunes of George Gershwin' as Rhapsody in Blue plays.
Q 10Which actress plays Tracy, the 17-year-old dating Allen's twice-divorced character in Manhattan?
Mariel Hemingway
Mariel Hemingway earned an Oscar nomination as Tracy, whom Isaac drops for a woman nearer his age and then, in the final scene, runs across the city to win back.
Q 11In which 1983 mockumentary does Allen play a man who takes on the traits of those around him?
Zelig
Zelig drops Allen's 'human chameleon' into real 1920s newsreel footage, a blend of old and new film achieved about a decade before Forrest Gump did the same with computers.
Q 12Who plays the Depression-era moviegoer in The Purple Rose of Cairo whose life Jeff Daniels's character walks into?
Mia Farrow
Mia Farrow's Cecilia is watching the film yet again when its explorer hero notices her and steps down from the screen, leaving the rest of the cast stranded and refusing to go on without him.
Q 13Which two actors won Supporting Oscars for Allen's 1986 Thanksgiving-framed family drama?
Q 21In Bananas (1971), Allen plays Fielding Mellish, a bumbling New Yorker caught up in what?
A Latin American revolution
A Latin American revolution in the invented republic of San Marcos sweeps him up after he tries to impress an activist, and the rebels end by making him their president.
Q 22Which 1966 film did Allen create by redubbing a Japanese spy thriller with new comic dialogue?
What's Up, Tiger Lily?
What's Up, Tiger Lily? keeps the pictures of a Japanese James Bond imitation and swaps the plot: the agents are now hunting the recipe for the world's best egg salad.
Q 23In Take the Money and Run (1969), Allen plays which incompetent thief?
Virgil Starkwell
Michael Caine and Dianne Wiest
Michael Caine and Dianne Wiest both won, but Caine missed the ceremony because he was away in the Bahamas filming Jaws: The Revenge.
Q 14What is the profession of Judah Rosenthal, Martin Landau's character in Crimes and Misdemeanors?
Ophthalmologist
Ophthalmologist Judah has his mistress killed and walks away untroubled, while the rabbi he treats, the one man who urged him to come clean, ends the film blind.
Q 15In which city is Allen's 2005 thriller Match Point set?
London
London, where Allen found the backing that American studios would not give a small film, suited him so well that he stayed on to make his next two pictures in England too.
Q 16Who won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for Vicky Cristina Barcelona?
Penélope Cruz
Penélope Cruz won as the combustible ex-wife of Javier Bardem's painter, and off screen the story ran the other way: the two actors married in 2010.
Q 17Which actor plays Gil Pender, the screenwriter transported to the 1920s each night in Midnight in Paris?
Owen Wilson
Owen Wilson changed the part: Allen had written Gil as an East Coast intellectual, then rethought him as a Californian once Wilson's name came up in casting.
Q 18Which 1986 film was Allen's biggest North American hit until Midnight in Paris passed it?
Hannah and Her Sisters
Hannah and Her Sisters took $40.1 million in 1986 and stayed his top earner for 25 years, though only on paper: the comparison takes no account of ticket-price inflation.
Q 19Who won the Best Actress Oscar for playing a fallen Manhattan socialite in Blue Jasmine (2013)?
Cate Blanchett
Cate Blanchett's ruined socialite, landing on her sister's doorstep, reminded many of Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, a role Blanchett had already played on stage.
Q 20In Sleeper, Allen's defrosted hero hides from the police by posing as what?
A robot
A robot is what Miles pretends to be, white-faced and stiff, until he is delivered as a butler to a socialite who decides her new servant's head needs replacing.
Virgil Starkwell's bank job falls apart at the counter, where the tellers cannot read his hold-up note and argue over whether he is pointing a 'gun' or a 'gub' at them.
Q 24Which 1975 Allen film starring Diane Keaton spoofs Russian literature in the Napoleonic era?
Love and Death
Love and Death parodies Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, with Allen and Keaton as Russians who break off their mock-philosophical debates to plot the assassination of Napoleon.
Q 25For which TV star did the young Allen write alongside Mel Brooks and Larry Gelbart?
Sid Caesar
Sid Caesar took Allen onto his writing staff in 1958, a team that became a comedy nursery: Gelbart, one of his colleagues there, went on to make the television version of M*A*S*H.
Q 26In which New York neighbourhood's clubs did Allen turn himself from joke writer into stand-up comedian?
Greenwich Village
Greenwich Village clubs were where the television gag writer began telling his own jokes in 1960, a sideline that soon brought talk-show bookings and three comedy albums.
Q 27Which comedian did Allen credit with opening up 'vistas' for comics like him?
Mort Sahl
Mort Sahl's conversational act, with a newspaper as its only prop, gave Allen, a joke writer who said he had never had the nerve, the push to try stand-up himself.
Q 28Which animal does Allen take to a costume party in a routine from his 1960s stand-up act?
A moose
A moose he believes he has shot comes round while strapped to his car, so he takes it along to a friends' costume party, where it mingles with the guests.
Q 29What was Allen's first Broadway hit, a 1966 farce set in an American embassy behind the Iron Curtain?
Don't Drink the Water
Don't Drink the Water was filmed in 1969 with Jackie Gleason, and a quarter of a century later Allen directed a television version and took the lead himself.
Q 30In which 1969 Broadway show did Diane Keaton first act opposite Allen, earning a Tony nomination?
Play It Again, Sam
Play It Again, Sam has Allen as a jilted film critic taking romantic advice from the ghost of Humphrey Bogart; Keaton played the same part again in the 1972 film.