\n<\/p>\n
His first movie with Mr. Allen was the comedy \u201cPlay It Again, Sam\u201d (1972)<\/a>, written by Mr. Allen but directed by Herbert Ross. Mr. Roberts played a businessman who had had \u201cthe foresight to buy Polaroid at 8 1\/2\u201d but is too busy to notice that his wife (Diane Keaton) is starving for attention.<\/p>\n \u201cPlay It Again, Sam\u201d 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.<\/p>\n He had already been nominated for a Tony the year before, for best actor in a musical, for his performance in \u201cHow Now, Dow Jones.\u201d 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 \u201cbundle of talent\u201d with \u201can aggressively untamed terrier face and eyebrows with independent suspension.\u201d<\/p>\n That was an improvement over what another Times critic, Walter Kerr, had said of an earlier Roberts performance in \u201cDon\u2019t Drink the Water\u201d<\/a> (1966), a comedy about an ambassador\u2019s son with serious behavior problems. It was Mr. Roberts\u2019s first collaboration with Mr. Allen, who wrote it. \u201cMildly engaging,\u201d Mr. Kerr shrugged.<\/p>\n The stage was a welcoming home for Mr. Roberts, decade after decade. There was London, where he starred with Betty Buckley in the musical \u201cPromises, Promises\u201d (1969). There was regional theater, where he appeared in \u201cFollies\u201d (1998) at the Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey. And there was Broadway<\/a>, where he took on some two dozen roles, mostly comic and musical.<\/p>\n He was praised as \u201curbanely foolish\u201d by Mr. Barnes when he played a downwardly mobile architect in Alan Ayckbourn\u2019s comedy \u201cAbsurd Person Singular\u201d (1974). He was a theater critic in a 1986 revival of \u201cArsenic and Old Lace\u201d and a retired Upper West Side doctor and annoyingly noble husband in Charles Busch\u2019s \u201cThe Tale of the Allergist\u2019s Wife\u201d (2000). Ben Brantley of The Times, reviewing that play, called Mr. Roberts \u201can expert in resonant underplaying.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n