Tony Roberts, a nonchalant friend in Woody Allen’s movie, dies at 85

His first film with Mr. Allen was the comedy ”Play it again, Sam ”(1972)Posted by Mr. Allen, but directed by Herbert Ross. Mr. Roberts played a businessman who had had “the foresight to buy polaroid of 8 1/2” but is too busy to note that his wife (Diane Keaton) is starving for attention.

“Play It Again, Sam” began on the Broadway scene 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 weak reviews, the show ran for more than a year, and Mr. Roberts received a Tony Award nomination for best highlighted actor in a spectacle.

He had already been nominated for a Tony the year before, to best actor in a musical, for his performance in “How now, Dow Jones.” Mr. Barnes from 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.” (It was Mr. Barnes who had noticed Mr. Roberts’ careful nonchalance “in his spectacle.)

It was an improvement in relation to what another Times critic, Walter Kerr, had said of a former Roberts performance in “Don’t drink the water” (1966), a comedy about an ambassador’s son with serious behavioral problems. It was Mr. Robert’s first collaboration with Mr. Allen who wrote it. “Mildly engaging,” Mr. Kerr.

The scene 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 a regional theater where he appeared in “Follies” (1998) at Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey. And there was BroadwayWhere he took on some two dozen roles, mostly cartoon and musical.

He was praised as “urbanelly foolish” by Mr. Barnes when he played a downward mobile architect in Alan Ayckbourn’s comedy “Absurd Person Singular” (1974). He was a theater critic in a 1986 resuscitation by “Arsenic and Old Lace” and a retired doctor in the Upper West Side and annoying noble man in Charles Busch’s “The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife” (2000). Ben Brantley from The Times, reviewed this spectacle, called Mr. Roberts “an expert in resonant underplaying.”