As coronavirus lays waste to much of the world’s economy and in particular its arts and culture sectors, it may indirectly also mark the end of one of US cinema’s most remarkable and consistent careers. That’s because at 84 years old Woody Allen is facing renewed and aggressive responses from the film industry to unproven allegations of the sexual abuse of his adopted daughter, Dylan Farrow, in 1992. Allen, who has made 49 films and has maintained what seems impossible, a work rate of a film a year for 45 years, is thinking of throwing in the towel on his filmmaking career.

Ahead of the UK streaming release of his 48th, A Rainy Day in New York, released in SA before lockdown, which helped to earn the accolade of top-selling film at the global box office for the director, a first in his career, Allen has given a number of interviews in recent weeks to UK newspapers. He spoke at length about the allegations against him, his recently published memoir Apropos of Nothing, his thoughts on the coronavirus and the devastation it has wreaked on his beloved hometown of New York and his despair at what he sees as the impending and unavoidable end to the cinema-going culture that has fed his imagination and sustained his career for more than half a century.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Allen laments that because of Covid-19, “the movie houses are all closed ... and I don’t know if many of them will come back. People are thinking: ‘It’s not so bad at home, I can just have dinner and then watch a movie on a big-screen television set with high definition and surround sound.’ But I don’t want to make movies for television, so it may be that I stop making them.”..