Starting with Annie Hall to the movie Something’s Gotta Give: Diane Keaton Was the Quintessential Queen of Comedy.

Many talented actresses have starred in romantic comedies. Ordinarily, when aiming to win an Oscar, they have to reach for more serious roles. Diane Keaton, who passed away recently, took an opposite path and pulled it off with disarmingly natural. Her initial breakout part was in The Godfather, about as serious an cinematic masterpiece 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 the stage play Play It Again, Sam. She regularly juggled serious dramas with funny love stories throughout the ’70s, and it was the latter that won her an Oscar for outstanding actress, changing the genre permanently.

The Oscar-Winning Role

The Oscar statuette was for Annie Hall, co-written and directed by Allen, with Keaton as the title character, part of the film’s broken romance. Allen and Keaton had been in a romantic relationship before production, and remained close friends until her passing; in interviews, Keaton portrayed Annie as a perfect image of herself, from Allen’s perspective. It would be easy, then, to believe her portrayal meant being herself. But there’s too much range in her performances, both between her Godfather performance and her Allen comedies and within Annie Hall itself, to discount her skill with rom-coms as merely exuding appeal – although she remained, of course, highly charismatic.

Evolving Comedy

The film famously functioned as Allen’s transition between more gag-based broad comedies and a realistic approach. Consequently, it has numerous jokes, dreamlike moments, and a freewheeling patchwork of a romantic memory in between some stinging insights into a doomed romantic relationship. In a similar vein, Diane, led an evolution in U.S. romantic comedies, portraying neither the screwball-era speed-talker or the sexy scatterbrain popularized in the 1950s. Instead, she blends and combines aspects of both to invent a novel style that still reads as oddly contemporary, interrupting her own boldness with her own false-start hesitations.

Observe, for instance the scene where Annie and Alvy Singer first connect after a match of tennis, fumbling over ping-ponging invitations for a lift (even though only one of them has a car). The banter is fast, but veers erratically, with Keaton soloing around her own discomfort before ending up stuck of that famous phrase, a expression that captures her anxious charm. The movie physicalizes that tone in the subsequent moment, as she has indifferent conversation while driving recklessly through city avenues. Subsequently, she composes herself delivering the tune in a club venue.

Complexity and Freedom

These are not instances of the character’s unpredictability. Across the film, there’s a dimensionality to her gentle eccentricity – her lingering counterculture curiosity to try drugs, her panic over lobsters and spiders, her unwillingness to be shaped by Alvy’s attempts to turn her into someone outwardly grave (for him, that implies death-obsessed). At first, Annie might seem like an odd character to receive acclaim; she’s the romantic lead in a film told from a male perspective, and the protagonists’ trajectory doesn’t lead to sufficient transformation accommodate the other. Yet Annie does change, in ways both observable and unknowable. She simply fails to turn into a more compatible mate for Alvy. Many subsequent love stories borrowed the surface traits – neurotic hang-ups, eccentric styles – failing to replicate her final autonomy.

Ongoing Legacy and Senior Characters

Maybe Keaton was wary of that tendency. Following her collaboration with Allen concluded, she paused her lighthearted roles; the film Baby Boom is really her only one from the entirety of the 1980s. Yet while she was gone, the film Annie Hall, the persona even more than the unconventional story, served as a blueprint for the style. Star Meg Ryan, for example, credits much of her love story success to Diane’s talent to portray intelligence and flightiness together. This made Keaton seem like a everlasting comedy royalty even as she was actually playing more wives (be it joyfully, as in that family comedy, or not as much, as in that ensemble comedy) and/or mothers (see that Christmas movie or Because I Said So) than single gals falling in love. Even in her comeback with the director, they’re a established married pair brought closer together by humorous investigations – and she eases into the part effortlessly, gracefully.

Yet Diane experienced another major rom-com hit in 2003 with Something’s Gotta Give, as a dramatist in love with a man who dates younger women (the star Jack Nicholson, naturally). The outcome? Her last Academy Award nod, and a whole subgenre of romantic tales where mature females (usually played by movie stars, but still!) take charge of their destinies. A key element her death seems like such a shock is that Keaton was still making these stories as recently as last year, a regular cinema fixture. Now fans are turning from expecting her roles to realizing what an enormous influence she was on the rom-com genre as it is recognized. Is it tough to imagine contemporary counterparts of Meg Ryan or Goldie Hawn who similarly follow in Keaton’s footsteps, that’s likely since it’s seldom for a star of her caliber to dedicate herself to a genre that’s frequently reduced to digital fare for a long time.

A Unique Legacy

Ponder: there are a dozen performing women who received at least four best actress nominations. It’s uncommon for any performance to originate in a romantic comedy, let alone half of them, as was the example of Keaton. {Because her