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Numerous accomplished performers have starred in romantic comedies. Usually, when aiming to earn an Academy Award, they must turn for weightier characters. The late Diane Keaton, who died unexpectedly, followed a reverse trajectory and made it look disarmingly natural. Her initial breakout part was in the classic The Godfather, about as serious an American masterpiece as has ever been made. However, concurrently, she reprised the part of the character Linda, the object of a nerdy hero’s affection, in a movie version of the theatrical production Play It Again, Sam. She persistently switched heavy films with funny love stories across the seventies, and the lighter fare that won her an Oscar for leading actress, transforming the category forever.

The Award-Winning Performance

The Oscar statuette was for Annie Hall, helmed and co-scripted by Woody Allen, with Keaton in the lead role, one half of the movie’s fractured love story. Woody and Diane were once romantically involved before production, and stayed good friends throughout her life; when speaking publicly, Keaton portrayed Annie as a perfect image of herself, through Allen’s eyes. It might be simple, then, to think her acting meant being herself. However, her versatility in Keaton’s work, both between her Godfather performance and her comedic collaborations and throughout that very movie, to underestimate her talent with rom-coms as just being charming – even if she was, of course, highly charismatic.

Evolving Comedy

Annie Hall famously served as Allen’s shift between more gag-based broad comedies and a authentic manner. As such, it has plenty of gags, dreamlike moments, and a improvised tapestry of a romantic memory in between some stinging insights into a fated love affair. Likewise, Keaton, led an evolution in U.S. romantic comedies, playing neither the rapid-fire comic lead or the sexy scatterbrain famous from the ’50s. Instead, she blends and combines elements from each to forge a fresh approach that still reads as oddly contemporary, halting her assertiveness with nervous pauses.

See, as an example the sequence with the couple first connect after a match of tennis, stumbling through reciprocal offers for a car trip (even though only just one drives). The exchange is rapid, but zig-zags around unpredictably, with Keaton maneuvering through her unease before ending up stuck of her whimsical line, a phrase that encapsulates her nervous whimsy. The story embodies that sensibility in the following sequence, as she has indifferent conversation while driving recklessly through city avenues. Afterward, she centers herself delivering the tune in a cabaret.

Complexity and Freedom

This is not evidence of Annie acting erratic. Across the film, there’s a dimensionality to her light zaniness – her post-hippie openness to experiment with substances, her anxiety about sea creatures and insects, her unwillingness to be shaped by Alvy’s efforts to shape her into someone outwardly grave (in his view, that signifies death-obsessed). At first, the character may look like an strange pick to receive acclaim; she plays the female lead in a movie seen from a man’s point of view, and the protagonists’ trajectory fails to result in either changing enough to suit each other. But Annie evolves, in manners visible and hidden. She just doesn’t become a more suitable partner for the male lead. Many subsequent love stories took the obvious elements – neurotic hang-ups, eccentric styles – not fully copying Annie’s ultimate independence.

Lasting Influence and Later Roles

Maybe Keaton was wary of that pattern. Post her professional partnership with Allen concluded, she took a break from rom-coms; her movie Baby Boom is really her only one from the complete 1980s period. Yet while she was gone, the film Annie Hall, the persona even more 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 ability to play smart and flibbertigibbet simultaneously. This rendered Keaton like a everlasting comedy royalty even as she was actually playing more wives (whether happily, as in Father of the Bride, or not as much, as in the film The First Wives Club) and/or parental figures (see the holiday film The Family Stone or that mother-daughter story) than unattached women finding romance. Even during her return with the director, they’re a established married pair drawn nearer by humorous investigations – and she slips into that role effortlessly, gracefully.

However, Keaton also enjoyed a further love story triumph in two thousand three with that Nancy Meyers movie, as a writer in love with a older playboy (Jack Nicholson, naturally). The outcome? One more Oscar recognition, and a entire category of romantic tales where senior actresses (usually played by movie stars, but still!) reclaim their love lives. A key element her passing feels so sudden is that Keaton was still making those movies up until recently, a regular cinema fixture. Now fans are turning from taking that presence for granted to realizing what an enormous influence she was on the rom-com genre as it is recognized. Should it be difficult to recall present-day versions of Meg Ryan or Goldie Hawn who similarly follow in Keaton’s footsteps, that’s probably because it’s uncommon for an actor of her talent to dedicate herself to a genre that’s frequently reduced to digital fare for a while now.

A Unique Legacy

Consider: there are a dozen performing women who have been nominated multiple times. It’s rare for one of those roles to start in a light love story, not to mention multiple, as was the example of Keaton. {Because her