Woody Allen has been a celebrity of sorts since his classic, 1969 movie, Take the Money and Run, catapulted him to the mainstream.
He’s also been balding since approximately the early 60s when he was still in his late 20s. So he’s been balding forever, basically, even though it’s never really gotten too much worse.
I was thinking about the scene in Annie Hall today, when Allan famously stated that life is divided into two categories, the horrible and miserable. The horrible category consists of seemingly unbearable afflictions such as blindness, terminal illness, and male pattern baldness. Just kidding! No, hair loss puts you into the miserable section, along with pretty much everyone else. The rest of us are just miserable, that was the point.
Does hair loss cause some misery? Yes, certainly.
However, about 80% of men will deal with hair loss in their lives. It’s not a life-threatening illness and you’ll get past it, and I’m here to help you.
Robert Price is a writer, consumer advocate, and hair loss researcher with thousands of hours of experience in the field. His goal is to keep you out of the hair loss rabbit hole, underworld, or whatever you want to call it. He founded Hair Loss Daily, the unbiased hair loss blog, in 2016. You can learn more about Robert in the my story section of this website.
I was finally expecting an article on Woody Allen’s stationary hair, internet actually lacked it!
See, that’s what I find unconvincing about hair loss being only genetic and only Dht related, basically balding before 35 and stop going bald after having reached, like in the case of Woody a peculiar sort of Nw4 pattern. I think he basically stayed the same since mid 80’s with full bald circle on the crown and a slightly thinned isolated and receded forelock.
Woody Allen is a definitely a peculiar case. I’d probably call him a Norwood 3V actually, with a very large bald spot, granted. The hairline is still pretty solid, not changed all that much even from the 70s. There are hundreds of genes involved in the balding process, and I don’t personally believe that our “behavior” or lifestyle can influence hair loss to any great degree. That said, things like smoking, heavy drinking, and stress may accelerate the process.
That is precisely the extent of baldness I was afraid I would end up with. I wanted to go all the way and I wanted it to happen fast. It did. All the way to Norwood 6. Unfortunately, not all the way to Norwood 7, but I can live with what I got.
Not going bald at all would have been a huge disappointment for me and going only Norwood 4 or 5 would have been almost as disappointing.
Unfortunately, we do not have a choice and must take what we get. So I lucked out. I’m reminded of that every time I look in the mirror and every time my wife kisses me on top of my shiny bald head. 🙂
Eric: More power to you about that, in a way I agree, many times shaved or closely buzzed heads seem to look quite better than long but sparse hair with crown loss, in an “all or nothing”, sort of way, not stating it in an absolute or serious way, personally and half joking, how you call it, “tongue in cheek” :).
But with this I mean that even if you had the “Allen” you could have shaved it off easily. I get you keep the horseshoe, but then could have shaved the just the forelock, dunno :).
Nerding out in the very approximative norwood scale, I called it 4 because another “piece” i noticed as missing on him, beyond the 3V, the recession going past the midline isolating the mid-forelock which is thinned out, disconnecting it partially from the sides. It’s strange though, that if the forelock is thick but receded, it would remain a 3 V however large the bald spot behind is at the crown and a bit ironic. Considering a Jude Law case with shrinking island and thick midline and crown is a variation Nw4A, curiously evolved by a non A pattern. But still more hair in total than Allen, for now (but it’s a very slow case).
It’s amazing that Woody Allen is nearly 90 and has kept more hair than most of his contemporaries who previously had full heads of hair. Michael Caine for example.
I saw a picture of Michael Caine the other day…and yeah, he looked pretty much bald but had good hair as a younger man. Woody is an unusual case, similar in some ways to former President George Bush.