His first movie with Mr. Allen was the comedy “Play It Again, Sam” (1972), written by Mr. Allen but directed by Herbert Ross. Mr. Roberts played a businessman who had had “the foresight to buy Polaroid at 8 1/2” but is too busy to notice that his wife (Diane Keaton) is starving for attention.
“Play It Again, Sam” began on the Broadway stage 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 faint-praise reviews, the show ran for more than a year, and Mr. Roberts received a Tony Award nomination for best featured actor in a play.
He had already been nominated for a Tony the year before, for best actor in a musical, for his performance in “How Now, Dow Jones.” Mr. Barnes of 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.”
That was an improvement over what another Times critic, Walter Kerr, had said of an earlier Roberts performance in “Don’t Drink the Water” (1966), a comedy about an ambassador’s son with serious behavior problems. It was Mr. Roberts’s first collaboration with Mr. Allen, who wrote it. “Mildly engaging,” Mr. Kerr shrugged.
The stage 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 regional theater, where he appeared in “Follies” (1998) at the Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey. And there was Broadway, where he took on some two dozen roles, mostly comic and musical.
He was praised as “urbanely foolish” by Mr. Barnes when he played a downwardly mobile architect in Alan Ayckbourn’s comedy “Absurd Person Singular” (1974). He was a theater critic in a 1986 revival of “Arsenic and Old Lace” and a retired Upper West Side doctor and annoyingly noble husband in Charles Busch’s “The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife” (2000). Ben Brantley of The Times, reviewing that play, called Mr. Roberts “an expert in resonant underplaying.”
