Woody and his women - Tim Carroll

Small and shy, Allan Konigsberg was, by his own admission, fixated with sex since his earliest memories as a boy growing up in Brooklyn. As famed film-maker Woody Allen, this obsession with sex would be the only autobiographical element he would acknowledge in his movies. But, until his scandalous, spectacular and highly public break-up with Mia Farrow, his private life remained, with few exceptions, a closely-guarded secret.;In this intimate, highly revealing biography, Tim Carroll traces the private life of the reclusive comic-turned-movie-maker from his childhood squabbles with an overbearing Jewish mother, to his bizarre relationship with Mia, a woman who has been described variously as "the perfect mother" and a "femme fatale in flower-child's clothing".;Woody Allen's marriages have both fallen apart. The first ended sadly, and the woman who was once his childhood sweetheart threatened him with legal action in a bitter dispute. The second fizzled out without rancour - and without the little girls he had longed for but she hadn't felt ready to have. His second wife, the actress Louise Lasser, still describes Woody as "the most caring person I've ever known". So what happened to the man who Mia Farrow was to call evil?;It looks at his great romance with Diane Keaton before the heady days of Annie Hall, his affair with a 17-year-old that inspired "Manhattan", and his twelve-year relationship with Mia which led to thirteen films, a child, an affair with her adopted daughter and - amid accusations of abuse - one of the most sensational court cases in recent times.;Paying particular attention to these later years, the author charts Woody Allen's odyssey through a life which began with humour but descended into tragedy as his visits to therapists failed to provide the answers he was looking for. Woody always loved women, and as he got older often behaved like a perennial teenager on the look out for romance. But with age has come increasing morbidity, and the belief that he will never find true love.