🔗 Share this article

Many great performers have appeared in rom-coms. Usually, should they desire to win an Oscar, they need to shift for more serious roles. Diane Keaton, who passed away recently, took an opposite path and executed it with disarmingly natural. Her debut significant performance was in The Godfather, as dramatic an cinematic masterpiece as has ever been made. Yet in the same year, she returned to the role of the character Linda, the love interest of a geeky protagonist, in a movie version of the theatrical production Play It Again, Sam. She continued to alternate intense dramas with funny love stories during the 1970s, and the lighter fare that earned her the Academy Award for outstanding actress, transforming the category forever.

The Academy Award Part

That Oscar was for Annie Hall, helmed and co-scripted 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 throughout her life; when speaking publicly, Keaton described Annie as a dream iteration of herself, from Allen’s perspective. One could assume, then, to think her acting meant being herself. But there’s too much range in Keaton’s work, from her Godfather role and her Allen comedies and throughout that very movie, to discount her skill with rom-coms as just being charming – though she was, of course, incredibly appealing.

A Transition in Style

Annie Hall notably acted as the director’s evolution between slapstick-oriented movies and a realistic approach. Consequently, it has plenty of gags, fantasy sequences, and a improvised tapestry of a love story recollection in between some stinging insights into a fated love affair. Likewise, Keaton, led an evolution in U.S. romantic comedies, playing neither the fast-talking screwball type or the glamorous airhead famous from the ’50s. On the contrary, she blends and combines traits from both to invent a novel style that feels modern even now, cutting her confidence short with nervous pauses.

Watch, for example the scene where Annie and Alvy Singer initially hit it off after a match of tennis, stumbling through reciprocal offers for a lift (despite the fact that only just one drives). The banter is fast, but meanders unexpectedly, with Keaton soloing around her unease before concluding with of “la di da”, a words that embody her anxious charm. The film manifests that tone in the next scene, as she makes blasé small talk while driving recklessly through Manhattan streets. Afterward, she centers herself performing the song in a club venue.

Depth and Autonomy

These are not instances of Annie acting erratic. During the entire story, there’s a dimensionality to her light zaniness – her hippie-hangover willingness to experiment with substances, her fear of crustaceans and arachnids, her resistance to control by Alvy’s attempts to mold her into someone apparently somber (for him, that implies preoccupied with mortality). At first, Annie could appear like an odd character to receive acclaim; she plays the female lead in a film told from a male perspective, and the central couple’s arc doesn’t bend toward sufficient transformation accommodate the other. However, she transforms, in manners visible and hidden. She simply fails to turn into a more compatible mate for her co-star. Plenty of later rom-coms stole the superficial stuff – neurotic hang-ups, eccentric styles – not fully copying Annie’s ultimate independence.

Ongoing Legacy and Senior Characters

Possibly she grew hesitant of that pattern. Following her collaboration with Woody finished, she paused her lighthearted roles; Baby Boom is essentially her sole entry from the whole decade of the eighties. Yet while she was gone, the film Annie Hall, the persona even more than the unconventional story, became a model for the category. Meg Ryan, for example, credits much of her love story success to Keaton’s ability to embody brains and whimsy at once. This cast Keaton as like a everlasting comedy royalty even as she was actually playing more wives (if contentedly, as in the movie Father of the Bride, or more strained, as in the film The First Wives Club) and/or moms (see The Family Stone or Because I Said So) than independent ladies in love. Even in her reunion with Woody Allen, they’re a established married pair drawn nearer by humorous investigations – and she slips into that role smoothly, wonderfully.

But Keaton did have an additional romantic comedy success in the year 2003 with that Nancy Meyers movie, as a writer in love with a older playboy (the star Jack Nicholson, naturally). The result? Her last Academy Award nod, and a complete niche of romantic tales where older women (usually played by movie stars, but still!) reassert their romantic and/or social agency. A key element her death seems like such a shock is that Keaton was still making such films up until recently, a regular cinema fixture. Today viewers must shift from assuming her availability to realizing what an enormous influence she was on the rom-com genre as we know it. If it’s harder to think of present-day versions of such actresses who similarly follow in Keaton’s footsteps, the reason may be it’s seldom for a star of Keaton’s skill to devote herself to a style that’s mostly been streaming fodder for a recent period.

An Exceptional Impact

Reflect: there are 10 living female actors who received at least four best actress nominations. It’s unusual for a single part to originate in a romantic comedy, especially not several, as was the example of Keaton. {Because her