🔗 Share this article

Many talented female actors have performed in love stories with humor. Usually, when aiming to win an Oscar, they must turn for dramatic parts. The late Diane Keaton, whose recent passing occurred, charted a different course and pulled it off with disarmingly natural. Her debut significant performance was in The Godfather, as dramatic an American masterpiece as ever created. Yet in the same year, she returned to the role of Linda, the love interest of a geeky protagonist, in a movie version of the stage play Play It Again, Sam. She persistently switched intense dramas with romantic comedies across the seventies, and it was the latter that secured her the Oscar for leading actress, changing the genre permanently.

The Academy Award Part

That Oscar was for Annie Hall, written and directed by Woody Allen, with Keaton as the title character, part of the film’s broken romance. Allen and Keaton dated previously before making the film, and stayed good friends throughout her life; during conversations, Keaton had characterized Annie as a dream iteration of herself, from Allen’s perspective. It would be easy, then, to believe her portrayal meant being herself. However, her versatility in her performances, contrasting her dramatic part and her Allen comedies and throughout that very movie, to underestimate her talent with romantic comedy as just being charming – even if she was, of course, incredibly appealing.

Evolving Comedy

Annie Hall famously served as the director’s evolution between broader, joke-heavy films and a authentic manner. Consequently, it has plenty of gags, imaginative scenes, and a freewheeling patchwork of a relationship memoir in between some stinging insights into a doomed romantic relationship. In a similar vein, Diane, presides over a transition in U.S. romantic comedies, portraying neither the rapid-fire comic lead or the sexy scatterbrain popularized in the 1950s. On the contrary, she mixes and matches elements from each to create something entirely new that feels modern even now, halting her assertiveness with nervous pauses.

Watch, for example the scene where Annie and Alvy Singer first connect after a match of tennis, stumbling through reciprocal offers for a car trip (despite the fact that only just one drives). The exchange is rapid, but veers erratically, with Keaton navigating her nervousness before winding up in a cul-de-sac of that famous phrase, a phrase that encapsulates her nervous whimsy. The story embodies that tone in the subsequent moment, as she has indifferent conversation while operating the car carelessly through Manhattan streets. Afterward, she finds her footing singing It Had to Be You in a cabaret.

Complexity and Freedom

These aren’t examples of Annie acting erratic. During the entire story, there’s a depth to her gentle eccentricity – her post-hippie openness to sample narcotics, her anxiety about sea creatures and insects, her resistance to control by Alvy’s efforts to turn her into someone outwardly grave (in his view, that signifies preoccupied with mortality). At first, the character may look like an strange pick to receive acclaim; she is the love interest in a story filtered through a man’s eyes, and the central couple’s arc fails to result in adequate growth accommodate the other. Yet Annie does change, in manners visible and hidden. She merely avoids becoming a more compatible mate for the male lead. Many subsequent love stories took the obvious elements – nervous habits, quirky fashions – not fully copying her final autonomy.

Ongoing Legacy and Senior Characters

Maybe Keaton was wary of that pattern. Following her collaboration with Woody finished, she took a break from rom-coms; her movie Baby Boom is practically her single outing from the whole decade of the eighties. Yet while she was gone, Annie Hall, the character perhaps moreso than the free-form film, became a model for the genre. Actress Meg Ryan, for example, is largely indebted for her comedic roles to Keaton’s skill to embody brains and whimsy at once. This made Keaton seem like a everlasting comedy royalty even as she was actually playing married characters (whether happily, as in that family comedy, or not as much, as in that ensemble comedy) and/or parental figures (see The Family Stone or that mother-daughter story) than unattached women finding romance. Even during her return with Allen, they’re a established married pair drawn nearer by comic amateur sleuthing – and she eases into the part smoothly, wonderfully.

However, Keaton also enjoyed a further love story triumph in 2003 with the film Something’s Gotta Give, as a dramatist in love with a younger-dating cad (Jack Nicholson, naturally). The result? Her final Oscar nomination, and a entire category of love stories where mature females (often portrayed by famous faces, but still!) reclaim their love lives. One factor her loss is so startling is that Diane continued creating those movies as recently as last year, a frequent big-screen star. Now fans are turning from taking that presence for granted to realizing what an enormous influence she was on the romantic comedy as it exists today. Should it be difficult to recall modern equivalents of those earlier stars who similarly follow in Keaton’s footsteps, that’s likely since it’s seldom for a star of her talent to dedicate herself to a style that’s often just online content for a while now.

An Exceptional Impact

Ponder: there are 10 living female actors who have been nominated multiple times. It’s unusual for a single part to start in a light love story, not to mention multiple, as was the example of Keaton. {Because her