🔗 Share this article

Numerous talented female actors have starred in rom-coms. Typically, should they desire to win an Oscar, they need to shift for weightier characters. Diane Keaton, who died unexpectedly, took an opposite path and executed it with seamless ease. Her debut significant performance was in The Godfather, about as serious an American masterpiece as ever created. Yet in the same year, 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 intense dramas with lighthearted romances across the seventies, and the lighter fare that earned her the Academy Award for leading actress, changing the genre permanently.

The Award-Winning Performance

The award was for the film Annie Hall, written and directed by Woody Allen, with Keaton portraying Annie, part of the film’s broken romance. Woody and Diane were once romantically involved before making the film, and stayed good friends for the rest of her life; when speaking publicly, Keaton portrayed Annie as an idealized version of herself, through Allen’s eyes. It might be simple, then, to think her acting meant being herself. Yet her breadth in Keaton’s work, both between her Godfather performance and her funny films with Allen and throughout that very movie, to dismiss her facility with rom-coms as merely exuding appeal – although she remained, of course, tremendously charming.

A Transition in Style

Annie Hall notably acted as the director’s evolution between slapstick-oriented movies and a more naturalistic style. Therefore, it has numerous jokes, dreamlike moments, and a freewheeling patchwork of a relationship memoir mixed with painful truths into a doomed romantic relationship. Likewise, Keaton, presides over a transition in American rom-coms, portraying neither the fast-talking screwball type or the sexy scatterbrain popularized in the 1950s. Instead, she mixes and matches traits from both to forge a fresh approach that still reads as oddly contemporary, cutting her confidence short with uncertain moments.

Watch, for example the sequence with the couple first connect after a game on the courts, stumbling through reciprocal offers for a ride (although only just one drives). The dialogue is quick, but meanders unexpectedly, with Keaton maneuvering through her nervousness before ending up stuck of her whimsical line, a expression that captures her nervous whimsy. The film manifests that feeling in the following sequence, as she engages in casual chat while driving recklessly through New York roads. Afterward, she centers herself singing It Had to Be You in a club venue.

Complexity and Freedom

This is not evidence of the character’s unpredictability. Throughout the movie, there’s a complexity to her light zaniness – her post-hippie openness to experiment with substances, her fear of crustaceans and arachnids, her unwillingness to be shaped by Alvy’s attempts to mold her into someone apparently somber (for him, that implies preoccupied with mortality). At first, Annie might seem like an odd character to receive acclaim; she’s the romantic lead in a story filtered through a man’s eyes, and the protagonists’ trajectory doesn’t bend toward sufficient transformation accommodate the other. Yet Annie does change, in ways both observable and unknowable. She merely avoids becoming a more compatible mate for Alvy. Many subsequent love stories stole the superficial stuff – nervous habits, odd clothing – without quite emulating Annie’s ultimate independence.

Ongoing Legacy and Senior Characters

Perhaps Keaton felt cautious of that trend. Following her collaboration with Woody finished, she took a break from rom-coms; the film Baby Boom is practically her single outing from the entirety of the 1980s. Yet while she was gone, Annie Hall, the character perhaps moreso than the unconventional story, emerged as a template for the genre. Star Meg Ryan, for example, is largely indebted for her comedic roles to Diane’s talent to embody brains and whimsy at once. This rendered Keaton like a permanent rom-com queen even as she was actually playing matrimonial parts (be it joyfully, as in that family comedy, or not as much, as in the film The First Wives Club) and/or mothers (see that Christmas movie or the comedy Because I Said So) than unattached women finding romance. Even in her comeback with the director, they’re a established married pair drawn nearer by funny detective work – and she slips into that role easily, beautifully.

Yet Diane experienced a further love story triumph in two thousand three with Something’s Gotta Give, as a playwright in love with a man who dates younger women (the star Jack Nicholson, naturally). What happened? Her last Academy Award nod, and a whole subgenre of romantic tales where older women (usually played by movie stars, but still!) take charge of their destinies. A key element her loss is so startling is that she kept producing these stories as recently as last year, a frequent big-screen star. Now fans are turning from expecting her roles to grasping the significant effect she was on the funny romance as it is recognized. Is it tough to imagine contemporary counterparts of those earlier stars who similarly follow in Keaton’s footsteps, that’s probably because it’s seldom for a star of her caliber to devote herself to a style that’s mostly been streaming fodder for a recent period.

A Special Contribution

Consider: there are a dozen performing women who earned several Oscar nods. It’s unusual for a single part to originate in a romantic comedy, let alone half of them, as was the example of Keaton. {Because her