🔗 Share this article

Numerous great actresses have performed in rom-coms. Usually, if they want to earn an Academy Award, they have to reach for dramatic parts. Diane Keaton, who died unexpectedly, followed a reverse trajectory and pulled it off with effortless grace. Her first major film role was in The Godfather, as dramatic an film classic as ever produced. But that same year, she revisited the character of the character Linda, the love interest of a geeky protagonist, in a film adaptation of the stage play Play It Again, Sam. She persistently switched serious 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 Oscar-Winning Role

The Oscar statuette was for the film Annie Hall, co-written and directed by Allen, with Keaton portraying Annie, a component of the couple’s failed relationship. Woody and Diane had been in a romantic relationship before production, and stayed good friends throughout her life; in interviews, Keaton described Annie as an idealized version of herself, from Allen’s perspective. It would be easy, then, to think her acting meant being herself. However, her versatility in Keaton’s work, contrasting her dramatic part and her comedic collaborations and within Annie Hall itself, to discount her skill with romantic comedy as just being charming – though she was, of course, tremendously charming.

Evolving Comedy

The film famously functioned as the director’s evolution between slapstick-oriented movies and a authentic manner. Therefore, it has plenty of gags, imaginative scenes, and a improvised tapestry of a relationship memoir alongside sharp observations into a doomed romantic relationship. Keaton, similarly, led an evolution in U.S. romantic comedies, portraying neither the rapid-fire comic lead or the sexy scatterbrain common in the fifties. Instead, she blends and combines aspects of both to create something entirely new that still reads as oddly contemporary, interrupting her own boldness with nervous pauses.

Watch, for example the scene where Annie and Alvy Singer initially bond after a tennis game, stumbling through reciprocal offers for a ride (even though only just one drives). The exchange is rapid, but meanders unexpectedly, with Keaton maneuvering through her unease before concluding with of “la di da”, a words that embody her nervous whimsy. The story embodies that sensibility in the following sequence, as she engages in casual chat while driving recklessly through city avenues. Later, she centers herself singing It Had to Be You in a nightclub.

Complexity and Freedom

These are not instances of Annie acting erratic. During the entire story, there’s a complexity to her gentle eccentricity – her post-hippie openness to try drugs, her panic over lobsters and spiders, her resistance to control by Alvy’s efforts to shape her into someone apparently somber (in his view, that signifies preoccupied with mortality). At first, Annie could appear like an odd character to earn an award; 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. But Annie evolves, in aspects clear and mysterious. She merely avoids becoming a more compatible mate for Alvy. Plenty of later rom-coms borrowed the surface traits – anxious quirks, eccentric styles – not fully copying Annie’s ultimate independence.

Enduring Impact and Mature Parts

Possibly she grew hesitant of that tendency. After her working relationship with Woody finished, she paused her lighthearted roles; Baby Boom is practically her single outing from the complete 1980s period. However, in her hiatus, the character Annie, the persona even more than the loosely structured movie, served as a blueprint for the genre. Actress Meg Ryan, for example, owes most of her rom-com career to Keaton’s ability 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 more strained, as in that ensemble comedy) and/or moms (see the holiday film The Family Stone or that mother-daughter story) than independent ladies in love. Even in her reunion with the director, they’re a established married pair united more deeply by funny detective work – and she slips into that role smoothly, wonderfully.

Yet Diane experienced an additional romantic comedy success in two thousand three with the film Something’s Gotta Give, as a playwright in love with a older playboy (Jack Nicholson, naturally). What happened? Her last Academy Award nod, and a complete niche of romantic tales where mature females (usually played by movie stars, but still!) reclaim their love lives. One factor her passing feels so sudden is that Diane continued creating these stories as recently as last year, a constant multiplex presence. Now fans are turning from taking that presence for granted to grasping the significant effect she was on the funny romance as it exists today. Should it be difficult to recall contemporary counterparts of those earlier stars who emulate her path, that’s likely since it’s rare for a performer of her caliber to devote herself to a genre that’s often just online content for a recent period.

A Special Contribution

Ponder: there are 10 living female actors who earned several Oscar nods. It’s unusual for a single part to begin in a rom-com, let alone half of them, as was the example of Keaton. {Because her