🔗 Share this article

Numerous accomplished performers have performed in rom-coms. Typically, when aiming to earn an Academy Award, they must turn for dramatic parts. Diane Keaton, who passed away recently, charted a different course and pulled it off with disarmingly natural. Her debut significant performance was in The Godfather, as weighty an cinematic masterpiece as ever created. But that same year, she reprised the part of the character Linda, the love interest of a geeky protagonist, in a film adaptation of the theatrical production Play It Again, Sam. She continued to alternate intense dramas with funny love stories across the seventies, and the lighter fare that won her an Oscar for best actress, transforming the category forever.

The Award-Winning Performance

That Oscar was for the film Annie Hall, co-written and directed by Allen, with Keaton portraying Annie, one half of the movie’s fractured love story. The director and star dated previously before making the film, and continued as pals throughout her life; in interviews, Keaton described Annie as an idealized version of herself, from Allen’s perspective. One could assume, then, to assume Keaton’s performance meant being herself. But there’s too much range in Keaton’s work, both between her Godfather performance and her Allen comedies and throughout that very movie, to underestimate her talent with rom-coms as just being charming – although she remained, of course, tremendously charming.

A Transition in Style

The film famously functioned as Allen’s transition between more gag-based broad comedies and a authentic manner. As such, it has plenty of gags, dreamlike moments, and a freewheeling patchwork of a romantic memory mixed with painful truths into a doomed romantic relationship. Keaton, similarly, oversaw a change in American rom-coms, portraying neither the fast-talking screwball type or the glamorous airhead famous from the ’50s. On the contrary, she mixes and matches elements from each to forge a fresh approach that feels modern even now, halting her assertiveness with uncertain moments.

See, as an example the moment when Annie and Alvy initially hit it off after a match of tennis, awkwardly exchanging proposals for a car trip (even though only just one drives). The exchange is rapid, but veers erratically, with Keaton maneuvering through her own discomfort before winding up in a cul-de-sac of that famous phrase, a phrase that encapsulates her nervous whimsy. The film manifests that sensibility in the following sequence, as she makes blasé small talk while navigating wildly through New York roads. Afterward, she composes herself singing It Had to Be You in a cabaret.

Dimensionality and Independence

These aren’t examples of Annie being unstable. Throughout the movie, there’s a dimensionality to her gentle eccentricity – her post-hippie openness to sample narcotics, her panic over lobsters and spiders, her resistance to control by Alvy’s efforts to mold her into someone outwardly grave (in his view, that signifies death-obsessed). In the beginning, Annie could appear like an strange pick to earn an award; she’s the romantic lead in a movie seen from a man’s point of view, and the central couple’s arc doesn’t bend toward adequate growth to suit each other. However, she transforms, in ways both observable and unknowable. She simply fails to turn into a more compatible mate for her co-star. Numerous follow-up films stole the superficial stuff – neurotic hang-ups, quirky fashions – without quite emulating her final autonomy.

Ongoing Legacy and Senior Characters

Possibly she grew hesitant of that pattern. Following her collaboration with Allen ended, she took a break from rom-coms; Baby Boom is really her only one from the complete 1980s period. However, in her hiatus, Annie Hall, the character perhaps moreso than the free-form film, emerged as a template for the style. Actress Meg Ryan, for example, is largely indebted for her comedic roles to Keaton’s ability to play smart and flibbertigibbet simultaneously. This made Keaton seem like a everlasting comedy royalty even as she was actually playing matrimonial parts (whether happily, as in that family comedy, or more strained, as in The First Wives Club) and/or parental figures (see the holiday film The Family Stone or the comedy Because I Said So) than single gals falling in love. Even in her reunion with the director, they’re a seasoned spouses brought closer together by funny detective work – and she slips into that role effortlessly, gracefully.

But Keaton did have a further love story triumph in the year 2003 with that Nancy Meyers movie, as a dramatist in love with a man who dates younger women (Jack Nicholson, naturally). What happened? One more Oscar recognition, and a entire category of love stories where older women (usually played by movie stars, but still!) reclaim their love lives. Part of the reason her death seems like such a shock is that Keaton was still making those movies as recently as last year, a regular cinema fixture. Now fans are turning from assuming her availability to realizing what an enormous influence she was on the romantic comedy as we know it. If it’s harder to think of present-day versions of those earlier stars who walk in her shoes, that’s probably because it’s seldom for a star of her caliber to dedicate herself to a style that’s mostly been streaming fodder for a recent period.

An Exceptional Impact

Reflect: there are a dozen performing women who received at least four best actress nominations. It’s rare for one of those roles to originate in a romantic comedy, let alone half of them, as was the case for Keaton. {Because her