🔗 Share this article

Many great performers have starred in romantic comedies. Usually, should they desire to earn an Academy Award, they need to shift for dramatic parts. The late Diane Keaton, whose recent passing occurred, charted a different course and made it look disarmingly natural. Her initial breakout part was in the classic The Godfather, as dramatic 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 the theatrical production Play It Again, Sam. She regularly juggled intense dramas with lighthearted romances throughout the ’70s, and the comedies that won her an Oscar for best actress, altering the genre for good.

The Oscar-Winning Role

The award was for the film Annie Hall, co-written and directed by Allen, with Keaton portraying Annie, part of the film’s broken romance. Woody and Diane had been in a romantic relationship before production, and stayed good friends for the rest of her life; in interviews, Keaton portrayed Annie as a dream iteration of herself, from Allen’s perspective. It might be simple, then, to think her acting required little effort. However, her versatility in her performances, contrasting her dramatic part and her comedic collaborations and inside Annie Hall alone, to dismiss her facility with rom-coms as merely exuding appeal – even if she was, of course, tremendously charming.

A Transition in Style

The film famously functioned as Allen’s shift between slapstick-oriented movies and a realistic approach. Therefore, it has lots of humor, imaginative scenes, and a freewheeling patchwork of a relationship memoir in between some stinging insights into a ill-fated romance. Keaton, similarly, led an evolution in Hollywood love stories, embodying neither the rapid-fire comic lead or the bombshell ditz famous from the ’50s. On the contrary, she fuses and merges traits from both to forge a fresh approach that seems current today, halting her assertiveness with nervous pauses.

See, as an example the scene where Annie and Alvy Singer initially bond after a match of tennis, awkwardly exchanging proposals for a car trip (even though only a single one owns a vehicle). The banter is fast, but veers erratically, with Keaton soloing around her nervousness before winding up in a cul-de-sac of that famous phrase, a phrase that encapsulates her quirky unease. The story embodies that feeling in the following sequence, as she engages in casual chat while driving recklessly through New York roads. Subsequently, she composes herself delivering the tune in a cabaret.

Depth and Autonomy

These are not instances of the character’s unpredictability. Across the film, there’s a complexity to her playful craziness – her post-hippie openness to experiment with substances, her panic over lobsters and spiders, her resistance to control by Alvy’s attempts to mold her into someone apparently somber (for him, that implies death-obsessed). In the beginning, Annie might seem like an odd character to win an Oscar; she’s the romantic lead in a story filtered through a man’s eyes, and the central couple’s arc doesn’t lead to sufficient transformation to suit each other. But Annie evolves, in aspects clear and mysterious. She merely avoids becoming a better match for the male lead. Many subsequent love stories took the obvious elements – neurotic hang-ups, odd clothing – not fully copying her final autonomy.

Enduring Impact and Mature Parts

Perhaps Keaton felt cautious of that tendency. Following her collaboration with Allen concluded, she stepped away from romantic comedies; the film Baby Boom is essentially her sole entry from the whole decade of the eighties. However, in her hiatus, the film Annie Hall, the persona even more than the loosely structured movie, served as a blueprint for the genre. Meg Ryan, for example, is largely indebted for her comedic roles to Diane’s talent to embody brains and whimsy at once. This cast Keaton as like a everlasting comedy royalty while she was in fact portraying matrimonial parts (be it joyfully, as in the movie Father of the Bride, or not as much, as in the film The First Wives Club) and/or parental figures (see The Family Stone or that mother-daughter story) than unattached women finding romance. Even in her comeback with Woody Allen, they’re a seasoned spouses brought closer together by funny detective work – and she fits the character smoothly, wonderfully.

However, Keaton also enjoyed a further love story triumph in 2003 with the film Something’s Gotta Give, as a dramatist in love with a man who dates younger women (actor Jack Nicholson, naturally). The outcome? Her final Oscar nomination, and a complete niche of romances where older women (typically acted by celebrities, but still!) reassert their romantic and/or social agency. One factor her loss is so startling is that Diane continued creating such films just last year, a constant multiplex presence. Today viewers must shift from taking that presence for granted to grasping the significant effect she was on the funny romance as we know it. If it’s harder to think of contemporary counterparts of such actresses who similarly follow in Keaton’s footsteps, that’s likely since it’s uncommon for an actor of her talent to dedicate herself to a genre that’s frequently reduced to digital fare for a recent period.

A Unique Legacy

Consider: there are a dozen performing women who have been nominated multiple times. It’s rare for one of those roles to begin in a rom-com, let alone half of them, as was the case for Keaton. {Because her