🔗 Share this article

Many accomplished female actors have starred in romantic comedies. Typically, when aiming to earn an Academy Award, they need to shift for dramatic parts. The late Diane Keaton, whose recent passing occurred, followed a reverse trajectory and executed it with disarmingly natural. Her initial breakout part was in The Godfather, as dramatic an film classic as ever produced. However, concurrently, she reprised the part of Linda, the love interest of a geeky protagonist, in a film adaptation of the stage play Play It Again, Sam. She persistently switched intense dramas with funny love stories during the 1970s, and the lighter fare that secured her the Oscar for leading actress, transforming the category forever.

The Award-Winning Performance

The Oscar statuette 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. The director and star dated previously prior to filming, and continued as pals until her passing; during conversations, Keaton described Annie as an idealized version of herself, through Allen’s eyes. It might be simple, then, to assume Keaton’s performance involves doing what came naturally. Yet her breadth in her performances, contrasting her dramatic part and her Allen comedies and within Annie Hall itself, to underestimate her talent with funny romances as merely exuding appeal – though she was, of course, incredibly appealing.

A Transition in Style

Annie Hall notably acted as Allen’s shift between slapstick-oriented movies and a realistic approach. Consequently, it has numerous jokes, imaginative scenes, and a freewheeling patchwork of a relationship memoir in between some stinging insights into a doomed romantic relationship. Likewise, Keaton, led an evolution in U.S. romantic comedies, playing neither the screwball-era speed-talker or the glamorous airhead common in the fifties. On the contrary, she fuses and merges elements from each to invent a novel style that still reads as oddly contemporary, halting her assertiveness with her own false-start hesitations.

Watch, for example the sequence with the couple first connect after a tennis game, fumbling over ping-ponging invitations for a car trip (even though only just one drives). The banter is fast, but meanders unexpectedly, with Keaton navigating her own discomfort before concluding with of that famous phrase, a words that embody her anxious charm. The movie physicalizes that feeling in the subsequent moment, as she has indifferent conversation while navigating wildly through Manhattan streets. Later, she finds her footing singing It Had to Be You in a nightclub.

Depth and Autonomy

These are not instances of Annie acting erratic. Across the film, there’s a complexity to her playful craziness – her post-hippie openness to try drugs, her anxiety about sea creatures and insects, her refusal to be manipulated by the protagonist’s tries to shape her into someone outwardly grave (in his view, that signifies death-obsessed). Initially, Annie could appear like an unusual choice to win an Oscar; she is the love interest in a story filtered through a man’s eyes, and the main pair’s journey doesn’t lead to sufficient transformation accommodate the other. But Annie evolves, in manners visible and hidden. She simply fails to turn into a more compatible mate for her co-star. Plenty of later rom-coms stole the superficial stuff – nervous habits, quirky fashions – without quite emulating her final autonomy.

Lasting Influence and Later Roles

Perhaps Keaton felt cautious of that pattern. Following her collaboration with Allen concluded, she paused her lighthearted roles; Baby Boom is really her only one from the entirety of the 1980s. Yet while she was gone, Annie Hall, the character perhaps moreso than the free-form film, emerged as a template for the style. Star Meg Ryan, for example, is largely indebted for her comedic roles to Diane’s talent to play smart and flibbertigibbet simultaneously. This cast Keaton as like a everlasting comedy royalty despite her real roles being married characters (be it joyfully, as in that family comedy, 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 Allen, they’re a long-married couple united more deeply by humorous investigations – and she fits the character smoothly, wonderfully.

However, Keaton also enjoyed a further love story triumph in 2003 with Something’s Gotta Give, as a dramatist in love with a older playboy (Jack Nicholson, naturally). The result? Her final Oscar nomination, and a complete niche of romances where mature females (usually played by movie stars, but still!) reclaim their love lives. A key element her passing feels so sudden is that Diane continued creating those movies up until recently, a regular cinema fixture. Now audiences will be pivoting from assuming her availability to realizing what an enormous influence she was on the rom-com genre as it exists today. Should it be difficult to recall modern equivalents of Meg Ryan or Goldie Hawn who walk in her shoes, that’s probably because it’s seldom for a star of her talent to dedicate herself to a category that’s frequently reduced to digital fare for a long time.

An Exceptional Impact

Ponder: there are ten active actresses who received at least four best actress nominations. It’s uncommon for any performance to begin in a rom-com, let alone half of them, as was the case for Keaton. {Because her