🔗 Share this article

Numerous great performers have appeared in love stories with humor. Typically, when aiming to earn an Academy Award, they have to reach for weightier characters. The late Diane Keaton, whose recent passing occurred, charted a different course and executed it with disarmingly natural. Her first major film role was in the classic The Godfather, as weighty an American masterpiece as ever created. However, concurrently, she revisited the character of Linda, the love interest of a geeky protagonist, in a movie version of Broadway’s Play It Again, Sam. She persistently switched intense dramas with romantic comedies during the 1970s, and the lighter fare that secured her the Oscar for outstanding actress, changing the genre permanently.

The Award-Winning Performance

The Oscar statuette was for the film Annie Hall, co-written and directed by Allen, with Keaton portraying Annie, one half of the movie’s fractured love story. Allen and Keaton had been in a romantic relationship before making the film, and continued as pals for the rest of her life; in interviews, Keaton described Annie as a perfect image of herself, from Allen’s perspective. It would be easy, then, to believe her portrayal required little effort. However, her versatility in her performances, from her Godfather role and her Allen comedies and within Annie Hall itself, to underestimate her talent with funny romances as merely exuding appeal – even if she was, of course, highly charismatic.

A Transition in Style

Annie Hall notably acted as Allen’s shift between slapstick-oriented movies and a realistic approach. As such, it has lots of humor, dreamlike moments, and a loose collage of a love story recollection in between some stinging insights into a doomed romantic relationship. Keaton, similarly, presides over a transition in American rom-coms, portraying neither the screwball-era speed-talker or the glamorous airhead popularized in the 1950s. Rather, she mixes and matches elements from each to forge a fresh approach that still reads as oddly contemporary, halting her assertiveness with uncertain moments.

Watch, for example the scene where Annie and Alvy Singer initially bond after a tennis game, stumbling through reciprocal offers for a car trip (although only just one drives). The banter is fast, but zig-zags around unpredictably, with Keaton maneuvering through her own discomfort before ending up stuck of her whimsical line, a words that embody her nervous whimsy. The story embodies that sensibility in the next scene, as she engages in casual chat while navigating wildly through New York roads. Subsequently, she centers herself delivering the tune in a club venue.

Dimensionality and Independence

These are not instances of Annie being unstable. Throughout the movie, there’s a complexity to her light zaniness – her lingering counterculture curiosity to experiment with substances, her anxiety about sea creatures and insects, her resistance to control by Alvy’s efforts to turn her into someone apparently somber (which for him means preoccupied with mortality). At first, the character may look like an odd character to earn an award; she’s the romantic lead in a story filtered through a man’s eyes, and the protagonists’ trajectory fails to result in adequate growth accommodate the other. But Annie evolves, in manners visible and hidden. She simply fails to turn into a more suitable partner for Alvy. Plenty of later rom-coms stole the superficial stuff – neurotic hang-ups, eccentric styles – not fully copying her final autonomy.

Ongoing Legacy and Senior Characters

Possibly she grew hesitant of that trend. After her working relationship with Woody finished, she took a break from rom-coms; her movie Baby Boom is practically her single outing from the complete 1980s period. However, in her hiatus, Annie Hall, the persona even more than the unconventional story, emerged as a template for the category. Actress Meg Ryan, for example, is largely indebted for her comedic roles to Diane’s talent to play smart and flibbertigibbet simultaneously. This rendered Keaton like a timeless love story icon despite her real roles being married characters (whether happily, as in the movie Father of the Bride, or more strained, as in The First Wives Club) and/or mothers (see the holiday film The Family Stone or that mother-daughter story) than single gals falling in love. Even during her return with Woody Allen, they’re a seasoned spouses brought closer together by comic amateur sleuthing – and she fits the character smoothly, wonderfully.

But Keaton did have another major rom-com hit in 2003 with Something’s Gotta Give, as a writer in love with a man who dates younger women (Jack Nicholson, naturally). What happened? Her final Oscar nomination, and a whole subgenre of romantic tales where mature females (typically acted by celebrities, but still!) reassert their romantic and/or social agency. One factor her passing feels so sudden is that Diane continued creating such films just last year, a constant multiplex presence. Today viewers must shift from expecting her roles to understanding the huge impact she was on the romantic comedy as it is recognized. Should it be difficult to recall modern equivalents of those earlier stars who walk in her shoes, the reason may be it’s uncommon for an actor of Keaton’s skill to devote herself to a genre that’s frequently reduced to digital fare for a recent period.

A Special Contribution

Consider: there are 10 living female actors who earned several Oscar nods. It’s unusual for a single part to originate in a romantic comedy, especially not several, as was the case for Keaton. {Because her