From Annie Hall all the way to Something’s Gotta Give: Diane Keaton Was the Definitive Queen of Comedy.

Numerous great performers have appeared in romantic comedies. Typically, if they want to receive Oscar recognition, they must turn for weightier characters. Diane Keaton, whose recent passing occurred, charted a different course and pulled it off with seamless ease. Her first major film role was in The Godfather, as weighty an film classic as ever produced. Yet in the same year, she reprised the part of the character Linda, the focus of an awkward lead’s admiration, in a movie version of the stage play Play It Again, Sam. She regularly juggled intense dramas with funny love stories throughout the ’70s, and the comedies that won her an Oscar for leading actress, transforming the category forever.

The Academy Award Part

The Oscar statuette was for the film Annie Hall, written and directed by Woody Allen, with Keaton as the title character, one half of the movie’s fractured love story. Allen and Keaton were once romantically involved prior to filming, and stayed good friends throughout her life; during conversations, Keaton had characterized Annie as an idealized version of herself, as seen by Allen. It would be easy, then, to assume Keaton’s performance meant being herself. Yet her breadth in Keaton’s work, from her Godfather role and her Allen comedies and within Annie Hall itself, to discount her skill with rom-coms as just being charming – even if she was, of course, tremendously charming.

A Transition in Style

Annie Hall notably acted as Allen’s shift between slapstick-oriented movies and a more naturalistic style. As such, it has plenty of gags, imaginative scenes, and a improvised tapestry of a romantic memory alongside sharp observations into a fated love affair. In a similar vein, Diane, led an evolution in U.S. romantic comedies, portraying neither the rapid-fire comic lead or the glamorous airhead famous from the ’50s. Rather, she fuses and merges aspects of both to create something entirely new that still reads as oddly contemporary, interrupting her own boldness with her own false-start hesitations.

See, as an example the moment when Annie and Alvy initially hit it off after a game on the courts, stumbling through reciprocal offers for a lift (even though only just one drives). The banter is fast, but veers erratically, with Keaton navigating her own discomfort before concluding with of “la di da”, a expression that captures her nervous whimsy. The movie physicalizes that sensibility in the following sequence, as she makes blasé small talk while operating the car carelessly through city avenues. Afterward, she centers herself delivering the tune in a club venue.

Dimensionality and Independence

These are not instances of Annie acting erratic. Across the film, there’s a dimensionality to her playful craziness – her hippie-hangover willingness to sample narcotics, her anxiety about sea creatures and insects, her resistance to control by Alvy’s attempts to mold her into someone apparently somber (in his view, that signifies focused on dying). In the beginning, Annie could appear like an unusual choice to receive acclaim; she plays the female lead in a movie seen from a man’s point of view, and the protagonists’ trajectory doesn’t lead to either changing enough to make it work. Yet Annie does change, in manners visible and hidden. She just doesn’t become a more suitable partner for the male lead. Plenty of later rom-coms borrowed the surface traits – anxious quirks, odd clothing – failing to replicate her core self-reliance.

Ongoing Legacy and Senior Characters

Possibly she grew hesitant of that tendency. Post her professional partnership with Allen ended, she stepped away from romantic comedies; Baby Boom is essentially her sole entry from the complete 1980s period. But during her absence, the character Annie, the persona even more than the loosely structured movie, served as a blueprint for the style. Meg Ryan, for example, owes most of her rom-com career to Keaton’s skill to play smart and flibbertigibbet simultaneously. This cast Keaton as like a timeless love story icon while she was in fact portraying matrimonial parts (be it joyfully, as in the movie Father of the Bride, or less so, as in that ensemble comedy) and/or moms (see that Christmas movie or the comedy Because I Said So) than single gals falling in love. Even in her reunion with Allen, they’re a long-married couple united more deeply by comic amateur sleuthing – and she eases into the part easily, beautifully.

However, Keaton also enjoyed another major rom-com hit in two thousand three with the film Something’s Gotta Give, as a dramatist in love with a older playboy (actor Jack Nicholson, naturally). The outcome? Her final Oscar nomination, and a whole subgenre of romances where older women (usually played by movie stars, but still!) reclaim their love lives. A key element her loss is so startling is that Keaton was still making these stories up until recently, a frequent big-screen star. Now fans are turning from taking that presence for granted to grasping the significant effect she was on the funny romance as it exists today. If it’s harder to think of contemporary counterparts of those earlier stars who emulate her path, the reason may be it’s rare for a performer of her talent to dedicate herself to a category that’s often just online content for a long time.

A Special Contribution

Consider: there are ten active actresses who earned several Oscar nods. It’s rare for one of those roles to begin in a rom-com, especially not several, as was the example of Keaton. {Because her