🔗 Share this article From the film Annie Hall to the movie Something’s Gotta Give: the actress Diane Keaton Was the Definitive Queen of Comedy. Many great female actors have starred in love stories with humor. Ordinarily, should they desire to earn an Academy Award, they need to shift for dramatic parts. Diane Keaton, whose recent passing occurred, followed a reverse trajectory and made it look disarmingly natural. Her initial breakout part was in the classic The Godfather, about as serious an cinematic masterpiece as ever produced. But that same year, she reprised the part of Linda, the love interest of a geeky protagonist, in a cinematic take of the stage play Play It Again, Sam. She regularly juggled intense dramas with funny love stories across the seventies, and it was the latter that earned her the Academy Award for best actress, altering the genre for good. The Award-Winning Performance That Oscar 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. The director and star dated previously before making the film, and remained close friends for the rest of her life; when speaking publicly, Keaton had characterized Annie as an idealized version of herself, through Allen’s eyes. It might be simple, then, to assume Keaton’s performance involves doing what came naturally. However, her versatility in her performances, contrasting her dramatic part and her comedic collaborations and inside Annie Hall alone, to underestimate her talent with romantic comedy as just being charming – although she remained, of course, tremendously charming. Shifting Genres Annie Hall famously served as Allen’s transition between more gag-based broad comedies and a realistic approach. Therefore, it has numerous jokes, dreamlike moments, and a freewheeling patchwork of a romantic memory alongside sharp observations into a doomed romantic relationship. Keaton, similarly, led an evolution in American rom-coms, embodying neither the rapid-fire comic lead or the sexy scatterbrain famous from the ’50s. Rather, she blends and combines elements from each to create something entirely new that still reads as oddly contemporary, cutting her confidence short with nervous pauses. Observe, for instance the scene where Annie and Alvy Singer initially bond after a tennis game, awkwardly exchanging proposals for a lift (although only one of them has a car). The dialogue is quick, but zig-zags around unpredictably, with Keaton maneuvering through her unease before ending up stuck of “la di da”, a expression that captures her nervous whimsy. The movie physicalizes that sensibility in the next scene, as she has indifferent conversation while operating the car carelessly through New York roads. Afterward, she centers herself delivering the tune in a cabaret. Complexity and Freedom These are not instances of Annie being unstable. Throughout the movie, there’s a depth to her gentle eccentricity – her hippie-hangover willingness to try drugs, her panic over lobsters and spiders, her refusal to be manipulated by the protagonist’s tries to mold her into someone outwardly grave (in his view, that signifies focused on dying). At first, Annie could appear like an unusual choice to win an Oscar; she plays the female lead in a film told from a male perspective, and the main pair’s journey fails to result in either changing enough to suit each other. Yet Annie does change, in aspects clear and mysterious. She simply fails to turn into a more suitable partner for the male lead. Plenty of later rom-coms took the obvious elements – anxious quirks, odd clothing – failing to replicate her final autonomy. Lasting Influence and Later Roles Possibly she grew hesitant of that trend. After her working relationship with Allen ended, she paused her lighthearted roles; her movie Baby Boom is essentially her sole entry from the complete 1980s period. But during her absence, Annie Hall, the role possibly more than the free-form film, became a model for the style. Actress Meg Ryan, for example, credits much of her love story success to Diane’s talent to play smart and flibbertigibbet simultaneously. This made Keaton seem like a timeless love story icon even as she was actually playing married characters (whether happily, as in the movie Father of the Bride, or not as much, as in The First Wives Club) and/or mothers (see The Family Stone or that mother-daughter story) than unattached women finding romance. Even during her return with the director, they’re a long-married couple brought closer together by comic amateur sleuthing – and she slips into that role easily, beautifully. Yet Diane experienced a further love story triumph in 2003 with Something’s Gotta Give, as a playwright in love with a older playboy (Jack Nicholson, naturally). The result? Her last Academy Award nod, and a whole subgenre of romantic tales where older women (usually played by movie stars, but still!) reassert their romantic and/or social agency. A key element her passing feels so sudden is that Keaton was still making those movies just 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 romantic comedy as we know it. Should it be difficult to recall modern equivalents of Meg Ryan or Goldie Hawn who similarly follow in Keaton’s footsteps, that’s likely since it’s rare for a performer of her talent to devote herself to a genre that’s frequently reduced to digital fare for a recent period. A Unique Legacy Reflect: there are a dozen performing women who have been nominated multiple times. It’s unusual for a single part to start in a light love story, especially not several, as was the example of Keaton. {Because her