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Plenty of accomplished actresses have performed in rom-coms. Usually, should they desire to win an Oscar, they need to shift for dramatic parts. The late Diane Keaton, who died unexpectedly, charted a different course and pulled it off with effortless grace. Her first major film role was in The Godfather, as weighty an American masterpiece as ever produced. But that same year, she returned to the role of Linda, the love interest of a geeky protagonist, in a movie version of the stage play Play It Again, Sam. She continued to alternate heavy films with romantic comedies across the seventies, and the lighter fare that secured her the Oscar for best actress, transforming the category forever.

The Award-Winning Performance

The Oscar statuette was for the film Annie Hall, written and directed by Woody Allen, with Keaton portraying Annie, one half of the movie’s fractured love story. Allen and Keaton had been in a romantic relationship prior to filming, and remained close friends until her passing; in interviews, Keaton portrayed Annie as a perfect image of herself, from Allen’s perspective. It might be simple, then, to believe her portrayal meant being herself. But there’s too much range in her performances, both between her Godfather performance and her Allen comedies and inside Annie Hall alone, to underestimate her talent with funny romances as merely exuding appeal – though she was, of course, highly charismatic.

Evolving Comedy

Annie Hall famously served as Allen’s transition between broader, joke-heavy films and a authentic manner. Consequently, it has lots of humor, fantasy sequences, and a improvised tapestry of a romantic memory mixed with painful truths into a doomed romantic relationship. Keaton, similarly, oversaw a change in American rom-coms, embodying neither the rapid-fire comic lead or the bombshell ditz common in the fifties. On the contrary, she mixes and matches traits from both to create something entirely new that feels modern even now, halting her assertiveness with nervous pauses.

Observe, for instance the scene where Annie and Alvy Singer first connect after a match of tennis, fumbling over ping-ponging invitations for a car trip (although only just one drives). The dialogue is quick, but veers erratically, with Keaton maneuvering through her nervousness before concluding with of “la di da”, a words that embody her anxious charm. The movie physicalizes that feeling in the subsequent moment, as she has indifferent conversation while driving recklessly through Manhattan streets. Subsequently, she composes herself delivering the tune in a nightclub.

Complexity and Freedom

These aren’t examples of the character’s unpredictability. Throughout the movie, there’s a complexity to her gentle eccentricity – her post-hippie openness to experiment with substances, her fear of crustaceans and arachnids, her unwillingness to be shaped by Alvy’s attempts to shape her into someone outwardly grave (for him, that implies focused on dying). In the beginning, Annie might seem like an unusual choice to receive acclaim; she plays the female lead in a story filtered through a man’s eyes, and the protagonists’ trajectory doesn’t bend toward either changing enough accommodate the other. However, she transforms, in aspects clear and mysterious. She just doesn’t become a better match for her co-star. Numerous follow-up films borrowed the surface traits – anxious quirks, quirky fashions – not fully copying her core self-reliance.

Enduring Impact and Mature Parts

Possibly she grew hesitant of that tendency. Following her collaboration with Allen ended, she took a break from rom-coms; her movie Baby Boom is practically her single outing from the complete 1980s period. Yet while she was gone, the character Annie, the character perhaps moreso than the loosely structured movie, became a model for the style. Meg Ryan, for example, owes most of her rom-com career to Keaton’s skill to portray intelligence and flightiness together. This made Keaton seem like a timeless love story icon despite her real roles being matrimonial parts (be it joyfully, as in that family comedy, or less so, as in The First Wives Club) and/or moms (see the holiday film The Family Stone or that mother-daughter story) than independent ladies in love. Even during her return with the director, they’re a seasoned spouses drawn nearer by humorous investigations – and she fits the character smoothly, wonderfully.

However, Keaton also enjoyed a further love story triumph in 2003 with the film Something’s Gotta Give, as a dramatist in love with a younger-dating cad (actor Jack Nicholson, naturally). The outcome? Her last Academy Award nod, and a entire category of love stories where senior actresses (typically acted by celebrities, but still!) take charge of their destinies. One factor her death seems like such a shock is that she kept producing such films as recently as last year, a regular cinema fixture. Now audiences will be pivoting from assuming her availability to understanding the huge impact she was on the rom-com genre as it is recognized. If it’s harder to think of modern equivalents of those earlier stars who walk in her shoes, that’s probably because it’s seldom for a star of Keaton’s skill to commit herself to a category that’s mostly been streaming fodder for a long time.

A Special Contribution

Ponder: there are a dozen performing women who earned several Oscar nods. It’s rare for one of those roles to originate in a romantic comedy, especially not several, as was the case for Keaton. {Because her