From Annie Hall all the way to Something’s Gotta Give: Diane Keaton Was the Definitive Queen of Comedy.

Plenty of great female actors have performed in rom-coms. Usually, if they want to win an Oscar, they need to shift for weightier characters. The late Diane Keaton, who passed away recently, followed a reverse trajectory and made it look effortless grace. Her first major film role was in The Godfather, as weighty an film classic as ever created. Yet in the same year, she revisited the character of the character Linda, the focus of an awkward lead’s admiration, in a cinematic take of the theatrical production Play It Again, Sam. She regularly juggled intense dramas with lighthearted romances during the 1970s, and the comedies that secured her the Oscar for outstanding actress, altering the genre for good.

The Academy Award Part

The Oscar statuette was for Annie Hall, helmed and co-scripted by Woody Allen, with Keaton portraying Annie, a component of the couple’s failed relationship. The director and star had been in a romantic relationship prior to filming, and remained close friends until her passing; in interviews, Keaton described Annie as an idealized version of herself, as seen by Allen. It would be easy, then, to think her acting involves doing what came naturally. Yet her breadth in Keaton’s work, contrasting her dramatic part and her Allen comedies and within Annie Hall itself, to discount her skill with funny romances as just being charming – even if she was, of course, tremendously charming.

Shifting Genres

Annie Hall notably acted as Allen’s shift between slapstick-oriented movies and a more naturalistic style. Consequently, it has plenty of gags, fantasy sequences, and a freewheeling patchwork of a love story recollection mixed with painful truths into a ill-fated romance. Keaton, similarly, oversaw a change in Hollywood love stories, playing neither the rapid-fire comic lead or the glamorous airhead popularized in the 1950s. On the contrary, she fuses and merges aspects of both to create something entirely new that seems current today, cutting her confidence short with uncertain moments.

Observe, for instance the scene where Annie and Alvy Singer first connect after a match of tennis, stumbling through reciprocal offers for a ride (despite the fact that only just one drives). The dialogue is quick, but veers erratically, with Keaton navigating her own discomfort before concluding with of “la di da”, a words that embody her nervous whimsy. The film manifests that tone in the subsequent moment, as she has indifferent conversation while navigating wildly through city avenues. Afterward, she composes herself delivering the tune in a nightclub.

Dimensionality and Independence

These aren’t examples of the character’s unpredictability. During the entire story, there’s a depth to her gentle eccentricity – her hippie-hangover willingness to sample narcotics, her fear of crustaceans and arachnids, her resistance to control by Alvy’s efforts to turn her into someone outwardly grave (for him, that implies focused on dying). At first, Annie might seem like an strange pick to receive acclaim; she’s the romantic lead in a story filtered through a man’s eyes, and the protagonists’ trajectory doesn’t lead to either changing enough accommodate the other. Yet Annie does change, in aspects clear and mysterious. She just doesn’t become a more suitable partner for her co-star. Many subsequent love stories borrowed the surface traits – neurotic hang-ups, odd clothing – not fully copying her final autonomy.

Ongoing Legacy and Senior Characters

Maybe Keaton was wary of that trend. Post her professional partnership with Allen ended, she took a break from rom-coms; her movie Baby Boom is practically her single outing from the complete 1980s period. However, in her hiatus, the character Annie, the character perhaps moreso than the unconventional story, served as a blueprint for the style. Meg Ryan, for example, owes most of her rom-com career to Diane’s talent to embody brains and whimsy at once. This cast Keaton as like a everlasting comedy royalty while she was in fact portraying matrimonial parts (be it joyfully, as in the movie Father of the Bride, or not as much, as in that ensemble comedy) and/or moms (see the holiday film The Family Stone or that mother-daughter story) than unattached women finding romance. Even in her comeback with Woody Allen, they’re a established married pair united more deeply by comic amateur sleuthing – and she slips into that role effortlessly, gracefully.

However, Keaton also enjoyed a further love story triumph in two thousand three with the film Something’s Gotta Give, as a dramatist in love with a younger-dating cad (Jack Nicholson, naturally). What happened? One more Oscar recognition, and a complete niche of romantic tales where mature females (usually played by movie stars, but still!) take charge of their destinies. One factor her death seems like such a shock is that she kept producing those movies up until recently, a frequent big-screen star. Now fans are turning from taking that presence for granted to realizing what an enormous influence she was on the funny romance as it is recognized. If it’s harder to think of modern equivalents of Meg Ryan or Goldie Hawn who similarly follow in Keaton’s footsteps, the reason may be it’s seldom for a star of her caliber to commit herself to a style that’s frequently reduced to digital fare for a while now.

A Unique Legacy

Reflect: there are ten active actresses who received at least four best actress nominations. It’s rare for one of those roles to start in a light love story, let alone half of them, as was the situation with Diane. {Because her