🔗 Share this article

Many talented actresses have performed in rom-coms. Usually, should they desire to win an Oscar, they must turn for weightier characters. Diane Keaton, who passed away recently, took an opposite path and made it look disarmingly natural. Her first major film role was in The Godfather, as weighty an film classic as has ever been made. Yet in the same year, she returned to the role of the character Linda, the love interest of a geeky protagonist, in a film adaptation of Broadway’s Play It Again, Sam. She regularly juggled intense dramas with funny love stories throughout the ’70s, and it was the latter that won her an Oscar for leading actress, transforming the category forever.

The Oscar-Winning Role

That Oscar was for the film Annie Hall, helmed and co-scripted by Woody Allen, with Keaton in the lead role, a component of the couple’s failed relationship. Woody and Diane were once romantically involved before making the film, and continued as pals throughout her life; in interviews, Keaton had characterized Annie as a perfect image of herself, through Allen’s eyes. One could assume, then, to believe her portrayal involves doing what came naturally. But there’s too much range in her performances, from her Godfather role and her comedic collaborations and within Annie Hall itself, to dismiss her facility with funny romances as just being charming – although she remained, of course, tremendously charming.

Evolving Comedy

Annie Hall notably acted as Allen’s transition between broader, joke-heavy films and a more naturalistic style. Therefore, it has plenty of gags, imaginative scenes, and a improvised tapestry of a relationship memoir alongside sharp observations into a ill-fated romance. In a similar vein, Diane, led an evolution in Hollywood love stories, embodying neither the fast-talking screwball type or the sexy scatterbrain famous from the ’50s. On the contrary, she fuses and merges elements from each to create something entirely new that seems current today, interrupting her own boldness with her own false-start hesitations.

Watch, for example the scene where Annie and Alvy Singer first connect after a tennis game, stumbling through reciprocal offers for a lift (although only one of them has a car). The dialogue is quick, but veers erratically, with Keaton maneuvering through her nervousness before winding up in a cul-de-sac of that famous phrase, a words that embody her quirky unease. The movie physicalizes that tone in the following sequence, as she engages in casual chat while driving recklessly through New York roads. Later, she finds her footing singing It Had to Be You in a cabaret.

Complexity and Freedom

These aren’t examples of Annie being unstable. Throughout the movie, there’s a dimensionality to her light zaniness – her post-hippie openness to experiment with substances, her anxiety about sea creatures and insects, her resistance to control by Alvy’s attempts to turn her into someone more superficially serious (which for him means focused on dying). At first, the character may look like an strange pick to win an Oscar; she plays the female lead in a story filtered through a man’s eyes, and the protagonists’ trajectory fails to result in adequate growth accommodate the other. However, she transforms, in aspects clear and mysterious. She merely avoids becoming a better match for her co-star. Plenty of later rom-coms borrowed the surface traits – neurotic hang-ups, eccentric styles – without quite emulating her core self-reliance.

Lasting Influence and Later Roles

Perhaps Keaton felt cautious of that trend. Post her professional partnership with Allen concluded, she paused her lighthearted roles; Baby Boom is really her only one from the whole decade of the eighties. But during her absence, Annie Hall, the character perhaps moreso than the loosely structured movie, emerged as a template for the style. Star 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 permanent rom-com queen while she was in fact portraying more wives (whether happily, as in the movie Father of the Bride, or less so, 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 Woody Allen, they’re a long-married couple drawn nearer by comic amateur sleuthing – and she slips into that role effortlessly, gracefully.

But Keaton did have a further love story triumph in 2003 with that Nancy Meyers movie, as a dramatist in love with a younger-dating cad (the star Jack Nicholson, naturally). What happened? One more Oscar recognition, and a whole subgenre of romantic tales where senior actresses (usually played by movie stars, but still!) reclaim their love lives. Part of the reason her death seems like such a shock is that Diane continued creating those movies just last year, a constant multiplex presence. Today viewers must shift from taking that presence for granted to understanding the huge impact she was on the funny romance as we know it. Is it tough to imagine contemporary counterparts of such actresses who walk in her shoes, that’s probably because it’s uncommon for an actor of Keaton’s skill 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 received at least four best actress nominations. It’s unusual for a single part to originate in a romantic comedy, especially not several, as was the example of Keaton. {Because her