🔗 Share this article

Numerous talented female actors have starred in romantic comedies. Usually, should they desire to win an Oscar, they have to reach for more serious roles. Diane Keaton, who died unexpectedly, followed a reverse trajectory and executed it with disarmingly natural. Her initial breakout part was in the classic The Godfather, as dramatic an American masterpiece as has ever been made. Yet in the same year, she returned to the role of Linda, the object of a nerdy hero’s affection, in a movie version of Broadway’s Play It Again, Sam. She regularly juggled serious dramas with lighthearted romances across the seventies, and the comedies that secured her the Oscar for outstanding actress, changing the genre permanently.

The Award-Winning Performance

That Oscar was for Annie Hall, co-written and directed by Allen, with Keaton portraying Annie, a component of the couple’s failed relationship. Allen and Keaton were once romantically involved prior to filming, and remained close friends throughout her life; when speaking publicly, Keaton had characterized Annie as an idealized version of herself, as seen by Allen. It might be simple, then, to think her acting involves doing what came naturally. But there’s too much range in Keaton’s work, contrasting her dramatic part and her Allen comedies and within Annie Hall itself, to underestimate her talent with rom-coms as just being charming – although she remained, of course, highly charismatic.

A Transition in Style

Annie Hall famously served as Allen’s transition between slapstick-oriented movies and a authentic manner. Therefore, it has lots of humor, fantasy sequences, and a freewheeling patchwork of a relationship memoir alongside sharp observations into a fated love affair. In a similar vein, Diane, presides over a transition in U.S. romantic comedies, portraying neither the screwball-era speed-talker or the glamorous airhead common in the fifties. Instead, she mixes and matches elements from each to forge a fresh approach that feels modern even now, halting her assertiveness with nervous pauses.

Watch, for example the sequence with the couple first connect after a game on the courts, stumbling through reciprocal offers for a ride (although only a single one owns a vehicle). The banter is fast, but meanders unexpectedly, with Keaton soloing around her nervousness before ending up stuck of that famous phrase, a words that embody her quirky unease. The film manifests that feeling in the following sequence, as she has indifferent conversation while operating the car carelessly through city avenues. Afterward, she centers herself performing the song in a nightclub.

Complexity and Freedom

These are not instances of the character’s unpredictability. During the entire story, there’s a complexity to her gentle eccentricity – her post-hippie openness to try drugs, her anxiety about sea creatures and insects, her resistance to control by Alvy’s attempts to shape her into someone more superficially serious (for him, that implies preoccupied with mortality). In the beginning, the character may look like an strange pick to receive acclaim; she plays the female lead in a film told from a male perspective, and the main pair’s journey fails to result in either changing enough accommodate the other. However, she transforms, in ways both observable and unknowable. She merely avoids becoming a more suitable partner for Alvy. Many subsequent love stories borrowed the surface traits – nervous habits, eccentric styles – without quite emulating Annie’s ultimate independence.

Lasting Influence and Later Roles

Maybe Keaton was wary of that pattern. Post her professional partnership with Allen concluded, she stepped away from romantic comedies; Baby Boom is essentially her sole entry from the whole decade of the eighties. Yet while she was gone, the character Annie, the role possibly more than the unconventional story, served as a blueprint for the style. Actress Meg Ryan, for example, is largely indebted for her comedic roles to Diane’s talent to portray intelligence and flightiness together. This cast Keaton as like a timeless love story icon while she was in fact portraying matrimonial parts (whether happily, as in Father of the Bride, or not as much, as in The First Wives Club) and/or mothers (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 united more deeply by humorous investigations – and she slips into that role smoothly, wonderfully.

However, Keaton also enjoyed a further love story triumph in 2003 with that Nancy Meyers movie, as a playwright in love with a younger-dating cad (the star Jack Nicholson, naturally). What happened? Her final Oscar nomination, and a entire category of romances where older women (often portrayed by famous faces, but still!) take charge of their destinies. Part of the reason her passing feels so sudden is that Diane continued creating these stories up until recently, a frequent big-screen star. Now fans are turning from taking that presence for granted to grasping the significant effect she was on the funny romance as it is recognized. Is it tough to imagine present-day versions of Meg Ryan or Goldie Hawn who similarly follow in Keaton’s footsteps, that’s probably because it’s uncommon for an actor of her talent to dedicate herself to a style that’s often just online content for a long time.

An Exceptional Impact

Consider: there are ten active actresses who earned several Oscar nods. It’s uncommon for any performance to begin in a rom-com, let alone half of them, as was the example of Keaton. {Because her