🔗 Share this article

Numerous talented performers have starred in love stories with humor. Ordinarily, should they desire to win an Oscar, they need to shift for weightier characters. The late Diane Keaton, whose recent passing occurred, followed a reverse trajectory and pulled it off with effortless grace. Her first major film role was in The Godfather, about as serious an American masterpiece as has ever been made. However, concurrently, she reprised the part of the character Linda, the focus of an awkward lead’s admiration, in a film adaptation of Broadway’s Play It Again, Sam. She continued to alternate serious dramas with funny love stories during the 1970s, and the comedies that won her an Oscar for best actress, altering the genre for good.

The Academy Award Part

The award was for the film Annie Hall, helmed and co-scripted by Woody Allen, with Keaton in the lead role, part of the film’s broken romance. Woody and Diane had been in a romantic relationship before production, and continued as pals for the rest of her life; when speaking publicly, Keaton described Annie as a perfect image of herself, as seen by Allen. It would be easy, then, to assume Keaton’s performance required little effort. Yet her breadth in her performances, from her Godfather role and her Allen comedies and throughout that very movie, to dismiss her facility with romantic comedy as simply turning on the charm – even if she was, of course, highly charismatic.

Evolving Comedy

Annie Hall notably acted as the director’s evolution between broader, joke-heavy films and a more naturalistic style. Therefore, it has lots of humor, dreamlike moments, and a freewheeling patchwork of a romantic memory mixed with painful truths into a doomed romantic relationship. Keaton, similarly, presides over a transition in Hollywood love stories, embodying neither the rapid-fire comic lead or the glamorous airhead common in the fifties. Rather, she fuses and merges elements from each to invent a novel style that still reads as oddly contemporary, cutting her confidence short with nervous pauses.

See, as an example the moment when Annie and Alvy initially bond after a game on the courts, fumbling over ping-ponging invitations for a ride (despite the fact that only one of them has a car). The dialogue is quick, but zig-zags around unpredictably, with Keaton maneuvering through her own discomfort before winding up in a cul-de-sac of her whimsical line, a phrase that encapsulates her anxious charm. The film manifests that sensibility in the subsequent moment, as she makes blasé small talk while operating the car carelessly through Manhattan streets. Later, she finds her footing singing It Had to Be You in a nightclub.

Depth and Autonomy

These aren’t examples of the character’s unpredictability. During the entire story, there’s a dimensionality to her light zaniness – her post-hippie openness to experiment with substances, her panic over lobsters and spiders, her resistance to control by the protagonist’s tries to turn her into someone outwardly grave (for him, that implies death-obsessed). Initially, the character may look like an unusual choice to earn an award; she plays the female lead in a movie seen from a man’s point of view, and the main pair’s journey doesn’t bend toward adequate growth to suit each other. However, she transforms, in ways both observable and unknowable. She simply fails to turn into a more suitable partner for her co-star. Numerous follow-up films took the obvious elements – neurotic hang-ups, quirky fashions – without quite emulating her core self-reliance.

Enduring Impact and Mature Parts

Maybe Keaton was wary of that tendency. Following her collaboration with Woody finished, she paused her lighthearted roles; her movie Baby Boom is practically her single outing from the entirety of the 1980s. Yet while she was gone, the film Annie Hall, the persona even more than the loosely structured movie, became a model for the genre. Actress Meg Ryan, for example, owes most of her rom-com career to Keaton’s ability to embody brains and whimsy at once. This cast Keaton as like a everlasting comedy royalty while she was in fact portraying matrimonial parts (if contentedly, as in Father of the Bride, or more strained, as in The First Wives Club) and/or moms (see the holiday film The Family Stone or Because I Said So) than single gals falling in love. Even during her return with Woody Allen, they’re a seasoned spouses brought closer together by humorous investigations – and she slips into that role easily, beautifully.

But Keaton did have a further love story triumph in 2003 with the film Something’s Gotta Give, as a dramatist in love with a younger-dating cad (actor Jack Nicholson, naturally). What happened? Her final Oscar nomination, and a whole subgenre of love stories where mature females (typically acted by celebrities, but still!) reclaim their love lives. Part of the reason her loss is so startling is that Diane continued creating such films up until recently, a frequent big-screen star. Now audiences will be pivoting from assuming her availability to grasping the significant effect she was on the funny romance as we know it. Should it be difficult to recall contemporary counterparts of Meg Ryan or Goldie Hawn who walk in her shoes, that’s likely since it’s uncommon for an actor of her talent to dedicate herself to a category that’s frequently reduced to digital fare for a recent period.

An Exceptional Impact

Reflect: there are ten active actresses who received at least four best actress nominations. It’s rare for one of those roles to begin in a rom-com, especially not several, as was the case for Keaton. {Because her