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Many great female actors have performed in love stories with humor. Typically, if they want to win an Oscar, they have to reach for weightier characters. The late Diane Keaton, who died unexpectedly, took an opposite path and made it look seamless ease. Her initial breakout part was in The Godfather, as weighty an American masterpiece as ever created. However, concurrently, she revisited the character of the character Linda, the object of a nerdy hero’s affection, in a movie version of Broadway’s Play It Again, Sam. She regularly juggled intense dramas with lighthearted romances throughout the ’70s, and the comedies that secured her the Oscar for outstanding actress, changing the genre permanently.

The Academy Award Part

That Oscar was for the film Annie Hall, written and directed by Woody Allen, with Keaton as the title character, a component of the couple’s failed relationship. Woody and Diane were once romantically involved prior to filming, and stayed good friends until her passing; during conversations, Keaton described Annie as a dream iteration of herself, through Allen’s eyes. It would be easy, then, to assume Keaton’s performance required little effort. But there’s too much range in her acting, both between her Godfather performance and her comedic collaborations and within Annie Hall itself, to dismiss her facility with rom-coms as just being charming – though she was, of course, tremendously charming.

A Transition in Style

Annie Hall notably acted as the director’s evolution between more gag-based broad comedies and a authentic manner. Consequently, it has plenty of gags, imaginative scenes, and a freewheeling patchwork of a love story recollection mixed with painful truths into a doomed romantic relationship. Keaton, similarly, presides over a transition in American rom-coms, portraying neither the fast-talking screwball type or the glamorous airhead popularized in the 1950s. Rather, she fuses and merges elements from each to invent a novel style that seems current today, interrupting her own boldness with nervous pauses.

Observe, for instance the moment when Annie and Alvy first connect after a tennis game, stumbling through reciprocal offers for a car trip (although only one of them has a car). The dialogue is quick, but veers erratically, with Keaton soloing around her nervousness before ending up stuck of her whimsical line, a words that embody her nervous whimsy. The story embodies that feeling in the next scene, as she engages in casual chat while operating the car carelessly through Manhattan streets. Subsequently, she composes herself delivering the tune in a cabaret.

Depth and Autonomy

This is not evidence of Annie acting erratic. Throughout the movie, there’s a depth to her gentle eccentricity – her post-hippie openness to sample narcotics, her panic over lobsters and spiders, her resistance to control by Alvy’s attempts to shape her into someone apparently somber (for him, that implies preoccupied with mortality). At first, the character may look like an odd character to win an Oscar; she plays the female lead in a story filtered through a man’s eyes, and the central couple’s arc doesn’t bend toward sufficient transformation to suit each other. However, she transforms, in aspects clear and mysterious. She merely avoids becoming a more suitable partner for Alvy. Many subsequent love stories took the obvious elements – anxious quirks, odd clothing – not fully copying her core self-reliance.

Lasting Influence and Later Roles

Maybe Keaton was wary of that pattern. Following her collaboration with Allen concluded, she paused her lighthearted roles; the film Baby Boom is really her only one from the whole decade of the eighties. Yet while she was gone, Annie Hall, the persona even more than the free-form film, emerged as a template for the category. Star Meg Ryan, for example, is largely indebted for her comedic roles to Keaton’s skill to portray intelligence and flightiness together. This rendered Keaton like a permanent rom-com queen even as she was actually playing more wives (if contentedly, as in the movie Father of the Bride, or not as much, as in that ensemble comedy) and/or moms (see that Christmas movie or Because I Said So) than unattached women finding romance. Even in her reunion with Woody Allen, they’re a established married pair united more deeply by funny detective work – and she eases into the part effortlessly, gracefully.

But Keaton did have another major rom-com hit in two thousand three with that Nancy Meyers movie, as a playwright in love with a man who dates younger women (the star Jack Nicholson, naturally). The result? One more Oscar recognition, and a whole subgenre of love stories where mature females (typically acted by celebrities, but still!) reassert their romantic and/or social agency. Part of the reason her passing feels so sudden is that Diane continued creating those movies as recently as last year, a regular cinema fixture. Now audiences will be pivoting from expecting her roles to realizing what an enormous influence she was on the romantic comedy as it exists today. If it’s harder to think of modern equivalents of those earlier stars who similarly follow in Keaton’s footsteps, that’s probably because it’s uncommon for an actor of Keaton’s skill to devote herself to a genre that’s often just online content for a long time.

A Special Contribution

Ponder: there are 10 living female actors who received at least four best actress nominations. It’s rare for one of those roles to begin in a rom-com, not to mention multiple, as was the case for Keaton. {Because her