From the film Annie Hall to Something’s Gotta Give: Diane Keaton Emerged as the Quintessential Comedy Queen.

Numerous talented actresses have appeared in romantic comedies. Usually, when aiming to earn an Academy Award, they must turn for dramatic parts. The late Diane Keaton, who passed away recently, took an opposite path and executed it with disarmingly natural. Her debut significant performance was in the classic The Godfather, as weighty an film classic as ever produced. However, concurrently, she revisited the character of Linda, the love interest of a geeky protagonist, in a cinematic take of Broadway’s Play It Again, Sam. She continued to alternate heavy films with romantic comedies throughout the ’70s, and the lighter fare that won her an Oscar for outstanding actress, changing the genre permanently.

The Academy Award Part

That Oscar was for Annie Hall, helmed and co-scripted by Woody Allen, with Keaton as the title character, a component of the couple’s failed relationship. Woody and Diane had been in a romantic relationship before production, and stayed good friends for the rest of her life; when speaking publicly, Keaton portrayed Annie as an idealized version of herself, through Allen’s eyes. It might be simple, then, to believe her portrayal meant being herself. Yet her breadth in her acting, both between her Godfather performance and her comedic collaborations and inside Annie Hall alone, to dismiss her facility with romantic comedy as merely exuding appeal – though she was, of course, tremendously charming.

Shifting Genres

The film famously functioned as Allen’s transition between broader, joke-heavy films and a authentic manner. Consequently, it has lots of humor, dreamlike moments, and a loose collage of a relationship memoir alongside sharp observations into a ill-fated romance. Keaton, similarly, presides over a transition in U.S. romantic comedies, portraying neither the screwball-era speed-talker or the glamorous airhead famous from the ’50s. On the contrary, she fuses and merges traits from both to forge a fresh approach that still reads as oddly contemporary, interrupting her own boldness with uncertain moments.

Watch, for example the sequence with the couple initially bond after a match of tennis, stumbling through reciprocal offers for a ride (even though only one of them has a car). The exchange is rapid, but zig-zags around unpredictably, with Keaton soloing around her unease before winding up in a cul-de-sac of her whimsical line, a expression that captures her nervous whimsy. The movie physicalizes that tone in the next scene, as she has indifferent conversation while driving recklessly through city avenues. Subsequently, she centers herself performing the song in a nightclub.

Depth and Autonomy

These aren’t examples of the character’s unpredictability. During the entire story, there’s a complexity to her light zaniness – her hippie-hangover willingness to experiment with substances, her fear of crustaceans and arachnids, her unwillingness to be shaped by the protagonist’s tries to turn her into someone more superficially serious (for him, that implies focused on dying). Initially, Annie might seem like an strange pick to win an Oscar; she’s the romantic lead in a story filtered through a man’s eyes, and the main pair’s journey fails to result in either changing enough to suit each other. However, she transforms, in aspects clear and mysterious. She just doesn’t become a more compatible mate for her co-star. Numerous follow-up films borrowed the surface traits – neurotic hang-ups, quirky fashions – without quite emulating Annie’s ultimate independence.

Lasting Influence and Later Roles

Perhaps Keaton felt cautious of that trend. Following her collaboration with Woody finished, she paused her lighthearted roles; her movie Baby Boom is really her only one from the entirety of the 1980s. But during her absence, the film Annie Hall, the character perhaps moreso than the loosely structured movie, emerged as a template for the category. Meg Ryan, for example, credits much of her love story success to Keaton’s skill to embody brains and whimsy at once. This made Keaton seem like a timeless love story icon despite her real roles being married characters (whether happily, as in that family comedy, or less so, as in The First Wives Club) and/or mothers (see that Christmas movie or that mother-daughter story) than single gals falling in love. Even during her return with the director, they’re a established married pair brought closer together by comic amateur sleuthing – and she fits the character easily, beautifully.

However, Keaton also enjoyed a further love story triumph in the year 2003 with that Nancy Meyers movie, as a writer in love with a younger-dating cad (actor Jack Nicholson, naturally). The result? Her last Academy Award nod, and a complete niche of love stories where mature females (often portrayed by famous faces, but still!) reassert their romantic and/or social agency. One factor her death seems like such a shock is that Keaton was still making such films as recently as last year, a frequent big-screen star. Now audiences will be pivoting from expecting her roles to understanding the huge impact she was on the rom-com genre as it exists today. If it’s harder to think of contemporary counterparts of Meg Ryan or Goldie Hawn who emulate her path, that’s likely since it’s seldom for a star of her caliber to devote herself to a style that’s often just online content for a long time.

A Special Contribution

Ponder: there are ten active actresses who received at least four best actress nominations. It’s unusual for a single part to start in a light love story, let alone half of them, as was the example of Keaton. {Because her