🔗 Share this article

Numerous great performers have starred in rom-coms. Typically, if they want to win an Oscar, they must turn for more serious roles. Diane Keaton, who died unexpectedly, followed a reverse trajectory and executed it with disarmingly natural. Her debut significant performance was in The Godfather, as dramatic an cinematic masterpiece as ever produced. Yet in the same year, she returned to the role of the character Linda, the love interest of a geeky protagonist, in a movie version of the theatrical production Play It Again, Sam. She continued to alternate heavy films with funny love stories during the 1970s, and it was the latter that earned her the Academy Award for leading actress, changing the genre permanently.

The Oscar-Winning Role

That Oscar was for Annie Hall, written and directed by Woody Allen, with Keaton as the title character, one half of the movie’s fractured love story. Woody and Diane had been in a romantic relationship before production, and continued as pals throughout her life; during conversations, Keaton described Annie as a perfect image of herself, as seen by Allen. One could assume, then, to believe her portrayal required little effort. But there’s too much range in her acting, both between her Godfather performance and her funny films with Allen and within Annie Hall itself, to dismiss her facility with romantic comedy as just being charming – though she was, of course, incredibly appealing.

Evolving Comedy

Annie Hall famously served as Allen’s transition between slapstick-oriented movies and a authentic manner. As such, it has numerous jokes, imaginative scenes, and a improvised tapestry of a love story recollection alongside sharp observations into a ill-fated romance. Keaton, similarly, oversaw a change in Hollywood love stories, embodying neither the fast-talking screwball type or the sexy scatterbrain popularized in the 1950s. Instead, she mixes and matches traits from both to forge a fresh approach that seems current today, halting her assertiveness with her own false-start hesitations.

Watch, for example the scene where Annie and Alvy Singer initially hit it off after a match of tennis, stumbling through reciprocal offers for a lift (despite the fact that only just one drives). The dialogue is quick, but meanders unexpectedly, with Keaton navigating her nervousness before winding up in a cul-de-sac of “la di da”, a phrase that encapsulates her anxious charm. The story embodies that tone in the following sequence, as she engages in casual chat while operating the car carelessly through New York roads. Afterward, she centers herself delivering the tune in a cabaret.

Complexity and Freedom

This is not evidence of Annie acting erratic. Throughout the movie, there’s a complexity to her gentle eccentricity – her lingering counterculture curiosity to sample narcotics, her panic over lobsters and spiders, her refusal to be manipulated by Alvy’s attempts to mold her into someone apparently somber (in his view, that signifies focused on dying). At first, Annie might seem like an strange pick to win an Oscar; she is the love interest in a story filtered through a man’s eyes, and the main pair’s journey fails to result in sufficient transformation accommodate the other. However, she transforms, in manners visible and hidden. She just doesn’t become a better match for the male lead. Many subsequent love stories borrowed the surface traits – anxious quirks, quirky fashions – without quite emulating her final autonomy.

Ongoing Legacy and Senior Characters

Maybe Keaton was wary of that tendency. Following her collaboration with Allen ended, she took a break from rom-coms; Baby Boom is practically her single outing from the whole decade of the eighties. Yet while she was gone, the film Annie Hall, the persona even more than the loosely structured movie, emerged as a template for the category. Star Meg Ryan, for example, credits much of her love story success to Keaton’s skill to portray intelligence and flightiness together. This cast Keaton as like a everlasting comedy royalty while she was in fact portraying married characters (whether happily, as in the movie Father of the Bride, or more strained, as in that ensemble comedy) and/or moms (see the holiday film The Family Stone or that mother-daughter story) than independent ladies in love. Even during her return with the director, they’re a long-married couple drawn nearer by comic amateur sleuthing – and she fits the character effortlessly, gracefully.

However, Keaton also enjoyed another major rom-com hit in 2003 with the film Something’s Gotta Give, as a dramatist in love with a younger-dating cad (Jack Nicholson, naturally). What happened? One more Oscar recognition, and a whole subgenre of romantic tales where senior actresses (often portrayed by famous faces, but still!) reassert their romantic and/or social agency. A key element her passing feels so sudden is that Keaton was still making such films just last year, a constant multiplex presence. Now audiences will be pivoting from assuming her availability to realizing what an enormous influence she was on the rom-com genre as it is recognized. 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 caliber to dedicate herself to a category that’s mostly been streaming fodder for a while now.

A Unique Legacy

Consider: there are ten active actresses who received at least four best actress nominations. It’s uncommon for any performance to start in a light love story, especially not several, as was the situation with Diane. {Because her