Plenty of great actresses have performed in romantic comedies. Ordinarily, when aiming to earn an Academy Award, they need to shift for weightier characters. Diane Keaton, who died unexpectedly, charted a different course and made it look seamless ease. Her initial breakout part was in The Godfather, about as serious an American masterpiece as ever produced. But that same year, she revisited the character of the character Linda, the object of a nerdy hero’s affection, in a film adaptation of Broadway’s Play It Again, Sam. She regularly juggled intense dramas with funny love stories across the seventies, and it was the latter that won her an Oscar for outstanding actress, altering the genre for good.
The Oscar statuette was for the film Annie Hall, helmed and co-scripted by Woody Allen, with Keaton in the lead role, part of the film’s broken romance. The director and star were once romantically involved before making the film, and remained close friends for the rest of her life; when speaking publicly, Keaton portrayed Annie as a dream iteration of herself, through Allen’s eyes. One could assume, then, to think her acting meant being herself. Yet her breadth in her performances, both between her Godfather performance and her comedic collaborations and within Annie Hall itself, to discount her skill with rom-coms as merely exuding appeal – even if she was, of course, tremendously charming.
Annie Hall notably acted as Allen’s transition between slapstick-oriented movies and a more naturalistic style. As such, it has numerous jokes, fantasy sequences, and a loose collage of a romantic memory alongside sharp observations into a fated love affair. Keaton, similarly, presides over a transition in American rom-coms, playing neither the screwball-era speed-talker or the glamorous airhead famous from the ’50s. Instead, she mixes and matches traits from both to invent a novel style that still reads as oddly contemporary, interrupting her own boldness with her own false-start hesitations.
See, as an example the scene where Annie and Alvy Singer initially hit it off after a game on the courts, fumbling over ping-ponging invitations 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 own discomfort before concluding with of “la di da”, a expression that captures her anxious charm. The film manifests that sensibility in the subsequent moment, as she makes blasé small talk while navigating wildly through Manhattan streets. Subsequently, she composes herself delivering the tune in a club venue.
These aren’t examples of Annie being unstable. Throughout the movie, there’s a depth to her light zaniness – her hippie-hangover willingness to sample narcotics, her panic over lobsters and spiders, her resistance to control by Alvy’s efforts to mold her into someone apparently somber (for him, that implies focused on dying). In the beginning, Annie might seem like an strange pick to receive acclaim; she’s the romantic lead in a movie seen from a man’s point of view, and the protagonists’ trajectory doesn’t bend toward 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 the male lead. Plenty of later rom-coms borrowed the surface traits – anxious quirks, odd clothing – failing to replicate her core self-reliance.
Possibly she grew hesitant of that tendency. Following her collaboration with Woody finished, she paused her lighthearted roles; Baby Boom is practically her single outing from the entirety of the 1980s. But during her absence, Annie Hall, the character perhaps moreso than the unconventional story, served as a blueprint for the genre. Star Meg Ryan, for example, owes most of her rom-com career to Keaton’s skill to embody brains and whimsy at once. This made Keaton seem like a timeless love story icon while she was in fact portraying married characters (if contentedly, as in Father of the Bride, or not as much, as in The First Wives Club) and/or moms (see that Christmas movie or Because I Said So) than single gals falling in love. Even during her return with Allen, they’re a long-married couple drawn nearer by comic amateur sleuthing – and she slips into that role effortlessly, gracefully.
Yet Diane experienced another major rom-com hit in two thousand three with that Nancy Meyers movie, as a playwright in love with a younger-dating cad (the star Jack Nicholson, naturally). What happened? Her last Academy Award nod, and a whole subgenre of love stories where senior actresses (typically acted by celebrities, but still!) reclaim their love lives. One factor her passing feels so sudden is that she kept producing those movies just last year, a regular cinema fixture. Now audiences will be pivoting from taking that presence for granted to understanding the huge impact she was on the romantic comedy as it exists today. Is it tough to imagine present-day versions of those earlier stars who similarly follow in Keaton’s footsteps, that’s likely since it’s uncommon for an actor of her talent to commit herself to a genre that’s mostly been streaming fodder for a while now.
Consider: there are ten active actresses who earned several Oscar nods. It’s rare for one of those roles to start in a light love story, not to mention multiple, as was the situation with Diane. {Because her
