Woody Allen has always mined his own life for his work, says Carole Cadwalladr in the London Observer. So it’s curious that there are almost no children in his films. This despite the fact that he adopted two children and had a son with his ex-partner Mia Farrow, and has since adopted two more children with his current wife, Soon-Yi. He brushes aside the idea that the absence of children in his work might be connected to his painful split with Farrow, after she discovered that he was involved with her adopted daughter, Soon-Yi. “There were never children in my films,” Allen says. “When I did Manhattan I made a list at the end of the movie of the things that made life worth living, and I got a letter from a lady saying: ‘You didn’t mention your child.’ Because I had a child in the movie, a young boy…I figured, so I didn’t mention my child, so what? It was only when I had children, over a decade later, that I realized what an egregious blunder that was.”
So does he have any contact with his and Farrow’s children? “Oh. Contact with those children? No, no. I don’t have contact with those children. I just have contact with my children.” But that, he says, was the court’s decision—not his. “There are things in life that are terrible, and you get over it. You move on.”
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