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Plenty of accomplished female actors have performed in love stories with humor. Typically, when aiming to win an Oscar, they have to reach for weightier characters. The late Diane Keaton, whose recent passing occurred, followed a reverse trajectory and executed it with seamless ease. Her initial breakout part was in The Godfather, about as serious an cinematic masterpiece as has ever been made. Yet in the same year, she revisited the character of Linda, the object of a nerdy hero’s affection, in a film adaptation of the theatrical production Play It Again, Sam. She regularly juggled heavy films with romantic comedies during the 1970s, and the comedies that earned her the Academy Award for leading actress, transforming the category forever.

The Award-Winning Performance

The Oscar statuette was for Annie Hall, written and directed by Woody Allen, with Keaton as the title character, part of the film’s broken romance. Woody and Diane dated previously before making the film, and stayed good friends for the rest of her life; during conversations, Keaton portrayed Annie as an idealized version of herself, through Allen’s eyes. One could assume, then, to believe her portrayal involves doing what came naturally. However, her versatility in her acting, both between her Godfather performance and her funny films with Allen and inside Annie Hall alone, to discount her skill with rom-coms as simply turning on the charm – although she remained, of course, highly charismatic.

Evolving Comedy

The film famously functioned as Allen’s shift between broader, joke-heavy films and a more naturalistic style. Consequently, it has lots of humor, dreamlike moments, and a loose collage of a love story recollection mixed with painful truths into a fated love affair. Likewise, Keaton, led an evolution in U.S. romantic comedies, playing neither the fast-talking screwball type or the glamorous airhead common in the fifties. Rather, she fuses and merges aspects of both to forge a fresh approach that still reads as oddly contemporary, interrupting her own boldness with her own false-start hesitations.

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 (although only just one drives). The exchange is rapid, but veers erratically, with Keaton maneuvering through her nervousness before concluding with of her whimsical line, a expression that captures her nervous whimsy. The film manifests that sensibility in the next scene, as she engages in casual chat while navigating wildly through city avenues. Subsequently, she centers herself delivering the tune in a nightclub.

Depth and Autonomy

This is not evidence of Annie acting erratic. Throughout the movie, there’s a complexity to her light zaniness – her post-hippie openness to experiment with substances, her fear of crustaceans and arachnids, her unwillingness to be shaped by the protagonist’s tries to shape her into someone apparently somber (in his view, that signifies death-obsessed). Initially, Annie could appear like an odd character to earn an award; she is the love interest in a film told from a male perspective, and the central couple’s arc doesn’t bend toward adequate growth to suit each other. But Annie evolves, in ways both observable and unknowable. She merely avoids becoming a more compatible mate for her co-star. Plenty of later rom-coms took the obvious elements – anxious quirks, quirky fashions – not fully copying her core self-reliance.

Enduring Impact and Mature Parts

Perhaps Keaton felt cautious of that pattern. Post her professional partnership with Allen ended, she paused her lighthearted roles; the film Baby Boom is practically her single outing from the whole decade of the eighties. But during her absence, the film Annie Hall, the character perhaps moreso than the unconventional story, emerged as a template for the genre. Actress Meg Ryan, for example, is largely indebted for her comedic roles to Diane’s talent to portray intelligence and flightiness together. This made Keaton seem like a everlasting comedy royalty while she was in fact portraying matrimonial parts (whether happily, as in the movie Father of the Bride, or less so, as in the film The First Wives Club) and/or parental figures (see The Family Stone or Because I Said So) than unattached women finding romance. Even in her comeback with Allen, they’re a long-married couple brought closer together by funny detective work – and she slips into that role effortlessly, gracefully.

However, Keaton also enjoyed an additional romantic comedy success in 2003 with that Nancy Meyers movie, as a playwright in love with a older playboy (the star Jack Nicholson, naturally). The result? Her final Oscar nomination, and a entire category of romantic tales where senior actresses (usually played by movie stars, but still!) take charge of their destinies. A key element her loss is so startling is that Keaton was still making those movies as recently as last year, a frequent big-screen star. Today viewers must shift from assuming her availability to grasping the significant effect she was on the funny romance as we know it. Should it be difficult to recall contemporary counterparts of such actresses who similarly follow in Keaton’s footsteps, the reason may be it’s uncommon for an actor of Keaton’s skill to commit herself to a style that’s often just online content for a recent period.

A Special Contribution

Consider: there are 10 living female actors who earned several Oscar nods. It’s uncommon for any performance to begin in a rom-com, not to mention multiple, as was the case for Keaton. {Because her