🔗 Share this article

Many accomplished performers have starred in rom-coms. Typically, should they desire to receive Oscar recognition, they must turn for dramatic parts. The late Diane Keaton, who passed away recently, followed a reverse trajectory and pulled it off with effortless grace. Her initial breakout part was in the classic The Godfather, as dramatic an cinematic masterpiece as ever created. Yet in the same year, she returned to the role of the character Linda, the object of a nerdy hero’s affection, in a film adaptation of the theatrical production Play It Again, Sam. She persistently switched heavy films with romantic comedies during the 1970s, and it was the latter that earned her the Academy Award for best actress, altering the genre for good.

The Academy Award Part

The award was for Annie Hall, co-written and directed by Allen, with Keaton in the lead role, part of the film’s broken romance. Woody and Diane dated previously prior to filming, and remained close friends until her passing; during conversations, Keaton described Annie as a perfect image of herself, through Allen’s eyes. It would be easy, then, to believe her portrayal meant being herself. Yet her breadth in Keaton’s work, from her Godfather role and her funny films with Allen and inside Annie Hall alone, to discount her skill with funny romances as just being charming – even if she was, of course, incredibly appealing.

Shifting Genres

Annie Hall notably acted as the director’s evolution between more gag-based broad comedies and a authentic manner. As such, it has numerous jokes, fantasy sequences, and a freewheeling patchwork of a relationship memoir in between some stinging insights into a ill-fated romance. Keaton, similarly, oversaw a change in U.S. romantic comedies, playing neither the fast-talking screwball type or the bombshell ditz common in the fifties. Instead, she blends and combines elements from each to invent a novel style that still reads as oddly contemporary, halting her assertiveness with uncertain moments.

Watch, for example the scene where Annie and Alvy Singer first connect after a tennis game, fumbling over ping-ponging invitations for a lift (although only one of them has a car). The banter is fast, but zig-zags around unpredictably, with Keaton soloing around her nervousness before winding up in a cul-de-sac of that famous phrase, a phrase that encapsulates her quirky unease. The movie physicalizes that feeling in the following sequence, as she engages in casual chat while driving recklessly through city avenues. Afterward, she finds her footing delivering the tune in a cabaret.

Complexity and Freedom

These aren’t examples of the character’s unpredictability. Throughout the movie, there’s a depth to her gentle eccentricity – her lingering counterculture curiosity to sample narcotics, her panic over lobsters and spiders, her unwillingness to be shaped by Alvy’s attempts to mold her into someone more superficially serious (for him, that implies focused on dying). Initially, 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 main pair’s journey doesn’t bend toward adequate growth to make it work. Yet Annie does change, in aspects clear and mysterious. She merely avoids becoming a more suitable partner for Alvy. Many subsequent love stories took the obvious elements – anxious quirks, quirky fashions – failing to replicate her final autonomy.

Enduring Impact and Mature Parts

Maybe Keaton was wary of that pattern. After her working relationship with Allen concluded, she took a break from rom-coms; the film Baby Boom is practically her single outing from the entirety of the 1980s. However, in her hiatus, the film Annie Hall, the role possibly 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 everlasting comedy royalty even as she was actually playing matrimonial parts (if contentedly, as in Father of the Bride, or less so, as in the film The First Wives Club) and/or moms (see the holiday film The Family Stone or the comedy Because I Said So) than independent ladies in love. Even in her reunion with the director, they’re a established married pair brought closer together by comic amateur sleuthing – and she eases into the part smoothly, wonderfully.

But Keaton did have a further love story triumph in 2003 with Something’s Gotta Give, as a dramatist in love with a older playboy (the star Jack Nicholson, naturally). The outcome? Her last Academy Award nod, and a whole subgenre of romances where senior actresses (often portrayed by famous faces, but still!) reassert their romantic and/or social agency. One factor her passing feels so sudden is that Diane continued creating those movies just last year, a regular cinema fixture. Now audiences will be pivoting from taking that presence for granted to grasping the significant effect she was on the rom-com genre as we know it. Is it tough to imagine present-day versions of Meg Ryan or Goldie Hawn who emulate her path, the reason may be it’s seldom for a star 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 received at least four best actress nominations. It’s uncommon for any performance to start in a light love story, not to mention multiple, as was the case for Keaton. {Because her