Woody Allen has been in the moviemaking business longer than most Hollywood directors and knows his Freud better than most analysts. Of course, it'd be hard to know where to start untangling the Gordian knot of neuroses of Hollywood's favorite schmuck.

Born Allen Stewart Konigsberg in 1935 to father Martin and mother Nettie in Brooklyn, Ny., Allen changed his name to Woody during a brief stint at New York University when he began writing quips for famed New York Post gossip columnist Earl Wilson.

Disinterested in college, Allen dropped out of school (and by some accounts was suspended from) after only a year to begin writing for television. Allegedly he failed a class called "Motion Picture Production" during his time at NYU.

Allen became a writer for standup comedian David Alber. Two years later Alber brought Allen on board as a writer for Sid Caesar's legendary "Your Show of Shows." The young writer worked alongside other soon to be famous names like Neil Simon and Mel Brooks.

Allen left television writing after five years to try his hand at his own material. He quickly made a name for himself as a standup comedian, often headlining at ultra-hip Manhattan nightspots like The Blue Angel. It was in his years in standup that Allen developed the neurotic Jewish New York sophisticate persona for which he has become known.

In 1964, Allen released a self-titled LP of his standup comedy that was nominated for a Grammy Award. His two follow-up albums were received with similar acclaim as well as a lawsuit for holding his ex-wife up to "scorn and ridicule."

But Allen felt that, like television writing, standup comedy limited his creative options. Already dabbling in theatre and cinema, Allen wrote and starred in his first film "What's New, Pussycat?" in 1965, which was both a box office and critical success. A number of plays and short films followed including the James Bond spoof "Casino Royale;" Allen was ready for his big break.

In 1969, Allen's first big-budget feature "Take the Money and Run" confirmed, or is it mitzvahed, Allen as one of Hollywood's most cutting edge and provocative directors.

Though a familiar Hollywood name, the New York native forewent the flare, fortune and fake breasts of California and moved into an apartment in Central Park East in 1970 where he established himself as one of New York's most prominent enthusiasts and cynics.

Biography aside, finding the real Woody Allen is a bit trickier to pin down than it seems. Allen, who has never shirked fame, insists that he is quite a different man than the ones he plays on the silver screen. But that seems a bit hard to digest. For example, take Allen's 1977 magnum opus "Annie Hall," which won the Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Writing (Screenplay Written Directly for Screen) and saw Diane Keaton take Best Actress in a Leading Role (Allen was nominated for Best Actor in a Leading Role, but lost to Richard Dreyfuss). Allen's character in "Annie Hall," Alvy Singer, is a sexually perverse standup comedian, an anxious Jewish New Yorker who's been in psychoanalysis for 15 years. Alvy is a neurotic mess of a man who can't seem to keep his love life together.

The real life Woody Allen is an apparently neurotic Jewish New Yorker, an award winning comedian, who has had a number of high profile marriages and high profile divorces including his 1992 split with longtime partner (though not wife) Mia Farrow that culminated in charges of sexual abuse of their adopted daughter and having an "unnaturally close" relationship with their son. To top it all off, Allen began a relationship with Farrow's adopted daughter Soon-Yi Previn, whom he eventually married and with whom he now has two children.

So, despite his insistence that he is actually a balanced, normal man, it's sometimes hard to separate the real Woody from his onscreen personae like the chronically depressed Singer in "Annie Hall" who sees the world as either vile or acutely vile.

"I feel that life is divided into the horrible and the miserable. That's the two categories. The horrible are like, I don't know, terminal cases, you know, and blind people— crippled. I don't know how they get through life. It's amazing to me. And the miserable is everyone else. That's all. So you should be thankful that you're miserable, because that's very lucky, to be miserable," Allen said in the movie.

Allen has been one of Hollywood's most prolific filmmakers. He has written, directed, and starred in at least one film almost every year since 1969. Allen has been nominated for 15 Academy Awards; he has won three, two for Best Writing (Screenplay Written Directly for Screen) — one for "Annie Hall" in 1977 and another for "Hannah and Her Sisters" in 1986 — and best director for "Annie Hall."

Allen demands almost exclusive artistic control over his film. Often, the studios he works with are unsure of quite what they will receive until Allen turns over the footage. In fact, Allen has his cast members sign confidentiality agreements prior to shoots and only gives them the pages of the script that have their lines on them.

Allen's films tend to garner a mixed reaction from critics. Some feel that he's a bit formulaic in his writing; often casting himself as the angst-ridden schmuck they presume he really is against a hot-to-trot ingénue. It has been said that Allen's recent career appears to be a fall from grace from the innovative and edgy comedy of "Annie Hall" and "Hannah and Her Sisters."

But Woody is far from being washed up. His recent films, though not blockbuster-style successes like "Spiderman" and "Titanic" have enjoyed a positive reviews from audiences and critics alike. After all, Allen is one of the hardest working people in show business — producing at least a film a year for the past 35 years.

Movies haven't been Allen's only claim to fame. Woody began playing the clarinet at age 12 and has had a deep love for jazz music ever since. Allen almost always uses jazz in the soundtracks to his movies. Often, he sets his films in periods in which jazz was popular, such as his 2001 caper comedy "The Curse of the Jade Scorpion," which was set in 1940's New York big band jazz era.

In fact, Allen has his own jazz band (and a decent one according to a number of major reviewers in the scene). Allen headlined at Michael's Pub in New York for over 25 years before the jazz hotspot closed its doors in 1997. Now Woody plays with Eddie Davis & his New Orleans Jazz Band at the Carlyle Hotel every Monday when he is not otherwise occupied with a film project. Allen has been so dedicated to his music that he does not attend the Academy Awards, which are always held on a Monday night; he did make a notable exception in 2002, when he appeared to plead the case for Hollywood to continue shooting movies in New York after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Though Allen often seems like a morose and hopeless neurotic, he quit therapy after almost 35 years. For a man whose writing obsesses over a Nietzschean recurrence of reliving his own shortcomings, Allen has matured not only as a writer and filmmaker, but as a person as well. Allen has survived 40 years of show business, 35 years of analysis, and hordes of nay-saying critics and continues to produce film after film.

Woody Allen has left, and continues to leave, his mark on cinema — not that he'd ever admit it. In his own words: "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work, I want to achieve it by not dying."

• That's Crazy!