Starting with Annie Hall all the way to the movie Something’s Gotta Give: Diane Keaton Emerged as the Archetypal Comedy Queen.

Numerous great actresses have appeared in romantic comedies. Typically, should they desire to receive Oscar recognition, they have to reach for dramatic parts. The late Diane Keaton, whose recent passing occurred, took an opposite path and pulled it off with effortless grace. Her first major film role was in the classic The Godfather, about as serious an American masterpiece as has ever been made. Yet in the same year, she reprised the part of Linda, the object of a nerdy hero’s affection, in a film adaptation of the theatrical production Play It Again, Sam. She regularly juggled intense dramas with funny love stories throughout the ’70s, and the lighter fare that secured her the Oscar for best actress, altering the genre for good.

The Oscar-Winning Role

The Oscar statuette was for the film Annie Hall, written and directed by Woody Allen, with Keaton in the lead role, part of the film’s broken romance. Woody and Diane had been in a romantic relationship prior to filming, and stayed good friends throughout her life; during conversations, Keaton portrayed Annie as a dream iteration of herself, from Allen’s perspective. One could assume, then, to assume Keaton’s performance required little effort. But there’s too much range in her acting, contrasting her dramatic part and her Allen comedies and within Annie Hall itself, to dismiss her facility with funny romances as merely exuding appeal – though she was, of course, incredibly appealing.

Evolving Comedy

Annie Hall famously served as the director’s evolution between slapstick-oriented movies and a realistic approach. As such, it has lots of humor, fantasy sequences, and a freewheeling patchwork of a romantic memory alongside sharp observations into a doomed romantic relationship. Keaton, similarly, led an evolution in American rom-coms, embodying neither the fast-talking screwball type or the sexy scatterbrain popularized in the 1950s. On the contrary, she blends and combines traits from both to forge a fresh approach that still reads as oddly contemporary, interrupting her own boldness with her own false-start hesitations.

Watch, for example the sequence with the couple initially hit it off after a tennis game, stumbling through reciprocal offers for a car trip (even though only a single one owns a vehicle). The exchange is rapid, but meanders unexpectedly, with Keaton soloing around her own discomfort before concluding with of “la di da”, a phrase that encapsulates her nervous whimsy. The movie physicalizes that sensibility in the following sequence, as she makes blasé small talk while driving recklessly through New York roads. Later, she composes herself performing the song in a cabaret.

Complexity and Freedom

These are not instances of Annie being unstable. Across the film, there’s a complexity to her light zaniness – her hippie-hangover willingness to sample narcotics, her anxiety about sea creatures and insects, her resistance to control by the protagonist’s tries to mold her into someone more superficially serious (in his view, that signifies death-obsessed). At first, Annie might seem like an odd character to receive acclaim; she plays the female lead in a story filtered through a man’s eyes, and the protagonists’ trajectory doesn’t lead to adequate growth accommodate the other. Yet Annie does change, in manners visible and hidden. She merely avoids becoming a more suitable partner for Alvy. Numerous follow-up films took the obvious elements – neurotic hang-ups, quirky fashions – without quite emulating her final autonomy.

Ongoing Legacy and Senior Characters

Perhaps Keaton felt cautious of that trend. Following her collaboration with Allen concluded, she stepped away from romantic comedies; her movie Baby Boom is practically her single outing from the entirety of the 1980s. However, in her hiatus, Annie Hall, the role possibly more than the unconventional story, emerged as a template for the style. Actress Meg Ryan, for example, owes most of her rom-com career to Keaton’s skill to portray intelligence and flightiness together. This rendered Keaton like a timeless love story icon despite her real roles being married characters (if contentedly, as in that family comedy, or not as much, as in the film The First Wives Club) and/or mothers (see the holiday film The Family Stone or that mother-daughter story) than single gals falling in love. Even in her comeback with Woody Allen, they’re a established married pair united more deeply by humorous investigations – and she fits the character smoothly, wonderfully.

But Keaton did have 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 (Jack Nicholson, naturally). What happened? Her last Academy Award nod, and a whole subgenre of love stories where mature females (often portrayed by famous faces, but still!) reclaim their love lives. A key element her passing feels so sudden is that Keaton was still making such films as recently as last year, a frequent big-screen star. Today viewers must shift from expecting her roles to understanding the huge impact she was on the rom-com genre as we know it. Should it be difficult to recall contemporary counterparts of those earlier stars who emulate her path, that’s likely since it’s rare for a performer of Keaton’s skill to commit herself to a style that’s mostly been streaming fodder for a recent period.

An Exceptional Impact

Consider: there are ten active actresses who have been nominated multiple times. It’s uncommon for any performance to start in a light love story, let alone half of them, as was the example of Keaton. {Because her