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Many talented female actors have appeared in love stories with humor. Typically, should they desire to receive Oscar recognition, they need to shift for dramatic parts. The late Diane Keaton, who passed away recently, followed a reverse trajectory and executed it with disarmingly natural. Her first major film role was in The Godfather, about as serious an American masterpiece as has ever been made. However, concurrently, she returned to the role of Linda, the love interest of a geeky protagonist, in a movie version of the theatrical production Play It Again, Sam. She continued to alternate serious dramas with funny love stories throughout the ’70s, and it was the latter that won her an Oscar for leading actress, changing the genre permanently.

The Award-Winning Performance

That Oscar was for the film Annie Hall, helmed and co-scripted by Woody Allen, with Keaton in the lead role, one half of the movie’s fractured love story. Woody and Diane were once romantically involved prior to filming, and stayed good friends until her passing; when speaking publicly, Keaton described Annie as a perfect image of herself, from Allen’s perspective. One could assume, then, to assume Keaton’s performance involves doing what came naturally. Yet her breadth in Keaton’s work, both between her Godfather performance and her funny films with Allen and throughout that very movie, to dismiss her facility with romantic comedy as merely exuding appeal – although she remained, of course, incredibly appealing.

Evolving Comedy

The film famously functioned as Allen’s shift between slapstick-oriented movies and a authentic manner. Therefore, it has plenty of gags, imaginative scenes, and a freewheeling patchwork of a relationship memoir in between some stinging insights into a ill-fated romance. Likewise, Keaton, oversaw a change in American rom-coms, portraying neither the rapid-fire comic lead or the bombshell ditz famous from the ’50s. Rather, she mixes and matches traits from both to create something entirely new that still reads as oddly contemporary, halting her assertiveness with nervous pauses.

Watch, for example the moment when Annie and Alvy initially hit it off after a game on the courts, awkwardly exchanging proposals for a lift (although only just one drives). The exchange is rapid, but veers erratically, with Keaton maneuvering through her nervousness before concluding with of “la di da”, a expression that captures her quirky unease. The film manifests that feeling in the following sequence, as she engages in casual chat while navigating wildly through New York roads. Subsequently, she centers herself delivering the tune in a cabaret.

Complexity and Freedom

These are not instances of the character’s unpredictability. During the entire story, there’s a depth to her gentle eccentricity – her hippie-hangover willingness to sample narcotics, her fear of crustaceans and arachnids, her refusal to be manipulated by the protagonist’s tries to mold her into someone apparently somber (which for him means preoccupied with mortality). Initially, the character may look like an odd character to win an Oscar; she plays the female lead in a movie seen from a man’s point of view, and the main pair’s journey doesn’t lead to adequate growth to make it work. Yet Annie does change, in aspects clear and mysterious. She just doesn’t become a more compatible mate for her co-star. Plenty of later rom-coms stole the superficial stuff – neurotic hang-ups, quirky fashions – not fully copying Annie’s ultimate independence.

Ongoing Legacy and Senior Characters

Possibly she grew hesitant of that trend. Post her professional partnership with Allen concluded, she took a break from rom-coms; Baby Boom is really her only one from the complete 1980s period. But during her absence, the character Annie, the persona even more than the loosely structured movie, served as a blueprint for the genre. Star Meg Ryan, for example, owes most of her rom-com career to Keaton’s ability to embody brains and whimsy at once. This made Keaton seem like a timeless love story icon while she was in fact portraying more wives (whether happily, as in the movie Father of the Bride, or not as much, as in The First Wives Club) and/or moms (see that Christmas movie or that mother-daughter story) than unattached women finding romance. Even during her return with Allen, they’re a established married pair brought closer together by comic amateur sleuthing – and she fits the character effortlessly, gracefully.

Yet Diane experienced a further love story triumph in two thousand three with Something’s Gotta Give, as a writer in love with a older playboy (the star Jack Nicholson, naturally). What happened? Her last Academy Award nod, and a whole subgenre of romances where senior actresses (usually played by movie stars, but still!) take charge of their destinies. Part of the reason her passing feels so sudden is that Diane continued creating such films just last year, a regular cinema fixture. Now audiences will be pivoting from assuming her availability to understanding the huge impact she was on the funny romance as it is recognized. Is it tough to imagine modern equivalents of those earlier stars who similarly follow in Keaton’s footsteps, that’s likely since it’s seldom for a star of Keaton’s skill to devote herself to a genre that’s often just online content for a recent period.

A Unique Legacy

Ponder: there are a dozen performing women who have been nominated multiple times. It’s rare for one of those roles to begin in a rom-com, let alone half of them, as was the situation with Diane. {Because her