🔗 Share this article

Plenty of great performers have appeared in rom-coms. Ordinarily, when aiming to receive Oscar recognition, they have to reach for weightier characters. The late Diane Keaton, who passed away recently, took an opposite path and made it look effortless grace. Her first major film role was in the classic The Godfather, as dramatic an film classic as ever produced. Yet in the same year, she revisited the character of Linda, the love interest of a geeky protagonist, in a film adaptation of Broadway’s Play It Again, Sam. She continued to alternate heavy films with funny love stories during the 1970s, and it was the latter that secured her the Oscar for best actress, altering the genre for good.

The Oscar-Winning Role

The award was for the film Annie Hall, written and directed by Woody Allen, with Keaton in the lead role, a component of the couple’s failed relationship. Woody and Diane were once romantically involved prior to filming, and remained close friends for the rest of her life; during conversations, Keaton described Annie as an idealized version of herself, as seen by Allen. It might be simple, then, to think her acting required little effort. But there’s too much range in her performances, both between her Godfather performance and her funny films with Allen and within Annie Hall itself, to dismiss her facility with rom-coms as just being charming – even if she was, of course, highly charismatic.

Shifting Genres

Annie Hall famously served as Allen’s shift between more gag-based broad comedies and a realistic approach. As such, it has lots of humor, dreamlike moments, and a loose collage of a love story recollection mixed with painful truths into a doomed romantic relationship. Likewise, Keaton, oversaw a change in American rom-coms, portraying neither the fast-talking screwball type or the sexy scatterbrain common in the fifties. Rather, she mixes and matches elements from each to invent a novel style that seems current today, cutting her confidence short with her own false-start hesitations.

Observe, for instance the moment when Annie and Alvy first connect after a match of tennis, fumbling over ping-ponging invitations for a ride (although only just one drives). The dialogue is quick, but zig-zags around unpredictably, with Keaton maneuvering through her own discomfort before ending up stuck of her whimsical line, a words that embody her quirky unease. The movie physicalizes that tone in the following sequence, as she makes blasé small talk while navigating wildly through New York roads. Subsequently, she composes herself singing It Had to Be You in a club venue.

Complexity and Freedom

This is not evidence of the character’s unpredictability. Across the film, there’s a depth to her playful craziness – her lingering counterculture curiosity to experiment with substances, her fear of crustaceans and arachnids, her resistance to control by the protagonist’s tries to shape her into someone outwardly grave (which for him means focused on dying). Initially, Annie could appear like an strange pick to receive acclaim; she’s the romantic lead in a film told from a male perspective, and the central couple’s arc fails to result in sufficient transformation to suit each other. However, she transforms, in ways both observable and unknowable. She merely avoids becoming a better match for the male lead. Numerous follow-up films stole the superficial stuff – neurotic hang-ups, quirky fashions – not fully copying her core self-reliance.

Lasting Influence and Later Roles

Perhaps Keaton felt cautious of that pattern. Post her professional partnership with Allen ended, she took a break from rom-coms; the film Baby Boom is essentially her sole entry from the entirety of the 1980s. Yet while she was gone, the character Annie, the persona even more than the free-form film, emerged as a template for the style. Star Meg Ryan, for example, credits much of her love story success to Diane’s talent to play smart and flibbertigibbet simultaneously. This made Keaton seem like a timeless love story icon even as she was actually playing more wives (be it joyfully, as in that family comedy, or less so, as in the film The First Wives Club) and/or mothers (see that Christmas movie or Because I Said So) than unattached women finding romance. Even during her return with Woody Allen, they’re a seasoned spouses united more deeply by comic amateur sleuthing – and she fits the character easily, beautifully.

Yet Diane experienced an additional romantic comedy success in two thousand three with the film Something’s Gotta Give, as a dramatist in love with a younger-dating cad (actor Jack Nicholson, naturally). The outcome? One more Oscar recognition, and a complete niche of romances where older women (often portrayed by famous faces, but still!) reclaim their love lives. A key element her passing feels so sudden is that she kept producing such films as recently as last year, a constant multiplex presence. Now audiences will be pivoting from expecting her roles to realizing what an enormous influence she was on the romantic comedy as we know it. Is it tough to imagine present-day versions of those earlier stars who similarly follow in Keaton’s footsteps, the reason may be it’s rare for a performer of Keaton’s skill to commit herself to a category that’s frequently reduced to digital fare for a recent period.

An Exceptional Impact

Ponder: 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