From Annie Hall all the way to the movie Something’s Gotta Give: Diane Keaton Was the Archetypal Rom-Com Royalty.

Many accomplished actresses have starred in rom-coms. Usually, when aiming to earn an Academy Award, they must turn for more serious roles. The late Diane Keaton, who died unexpectedly, took an opposite path and pulled it off with disarmingly natural. Her debut significant performance was in the classic The Godfather, as dramatic an cinematic masterpiece as ever produced. But that same year, she reprised the part of Linda, the love interest of a geeky protagonist, in a film adaptation of the stage play Play It Again, Sam. She persistently switched heavy films with funny love stories across the seventies, and the comedies that secured her the Oscar for best actress, transforming the category forever.

The Academy Award Part

The award was for Annie Hall, helmed and co-scripted by Woody Allen, with Keaton portraying Annie, part of the film’s broken romance. The director and star had been in a romantic relationship before production, and continued as pals until her passing; in interviews, Keaton portrayed Annie as a perfect image of herself, through Allen’s eyes. It would be easy, then, to assume Keaton’s performance required little effort. Yet her breadth in her acting, both between her Godfather performance and her comedic collaborations and inside Annie Hall alone, to underestimate her talent with funny romances as merely exuding appeal – although she remained, of course, highly charismatic.

A Transition in Style

The film famously functioned as the director’s evolution between broader, joke-heavy films and a authentic manner. Therefore, it has lots of humor, imaginative scenes, and a improvised tapestry of a relationship memoir mixed with painful truths into a ill-fated romance. In a similar vein, Diane, presides over a transition in Hollywood love stories, embodying neither the rapid-fire comic lead or the bombshell ditz famous from the ’50s. Rather, she fuses and merges aspects of both to invent a novel style that still reads as oddly contemporary, interrupting her own boldness with nervous pauses.

Watch, for example the scene where Annie and Alvy Singer first connect after a match of tennis, fumbling over ping-ponging invitations for a ride (although only a single one owns a vehicle). The dialogue is quick, but zig-zags around unpredictably, with Keaton maneuvering through her own discomfort before concluding with of that famous phrase, a expression that captures her quirky unease. The story embodies that feeling in the following sequence, as she has indifferent conversation while driving recklessly through city avenues. Later, she centers herself performing the song in a cabaret.

Depth and Autonomy

These are not instances of Annie being unstable. Throughout the movie, there’s a dimensionality to her playful craziness – her lingering counterculture curiosity to sample narcotics, her fear of crustaceans and arachnids, her unwillingness to be shaped by Alvy’s efforts to shape her into someone more superficially serious (in his view, that signifies preoccupied with mortality). In the beginning, Annie might seem like an unusual choice to earn an award; she’s the romantic lead in a film told from a male perspective, and the central couple’s arc doesn’t bend toward either changing enough to suit each other. Yet Annie does change, in manners visible and hidden. She just doesn’t become a better match for Alvy. Numerous follow-up films stole the superficial stuff – nervous habits, quirky fashions – not fully copying her core self-reliance.

Ongoing Legacy and Senior Characters

Possibly she grew hesitant of that pattern. After her working relationship with Woody finished, she stepped away from romantic comedies; her movie Baby Boom is practically her single outing from the whole decade of the eighties. However, in her hiatus, the character Annie, the role possibly more than the loosely structured movie, became a model for the category. Meg Ryan, for example, is largely indebted for her comedic roles to Diane’s talent to play smart and flibbertigibbet simultaneously. This made Keaton seem like a everlasting comedy royalty while she was in fact portraying matrimonial parts (if contentedly, as in that family comedy, or not as much, as in The First Wives Club) and/or moms (see the holiday film The Family Stone or the comedy Because I Said So) than unattached women finding romance. Even during her return with Allen, they’re a established married pair brought closer together by funny detective work – and she fits the character effortlessly, gracefully.

But Keaton did have another major rom-com hit in the year 2003 with the film Something’s Gotta Give, as a playwright in love with a younger-dating cad (the star Jack Nicholson, naturally). The result? Her final Oscar nomination, and a complete niche of love stories where older women (typically acted by celebrities, but still!) take charge of their destinies. One factor 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 grasping the significant effect she was on the funny romance as we know it. Is it tough to imagine contemporary counterparts of such actresses who walk in her shoes, that’s probably because it’s rare for a performer of her caliber to dedicate herself to a style that’s mostly been streaming fodder for a long time.

An Exceptional Impact

Ponder: there are a dozen performing women who have been nominated multiple times. It’s rare for one of those roles to begin in a rom-com, not to mention multiple, as was the example of Keaton. {Because her