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Numerous accomplished female actors have starred in love stories with humor. Usually, if they want to earn an Academy Award, they need to shift for more serious roles. The late Diane Keaton, who died unexpectedly, took an opposite path and executed it with disarmingly natural. Her first major film role was in the classic The Godfather, as dramatic an film classic as has ever been made. However, concurrently, 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 throughout the ’70s, and it was the latter that earned her the Academy Award for best actress, changing the genre permanently.

The Award-Winning Performance

The award was for Annie Hall, helmed and co-scripted by Woody Allen, with Keaton in the lead role, one half of the movie’s fractured love story. The director and star were once romantically involved before making the film, and stayed good friends throughout her life; during conversations, Keaton portrayed Annie as a perfect image of herself, as seen by Allen. One could assume, then, to assume Keaton’s performance meant being herself. Yet her breadth in her performances, from her Godfather role and her funny films with Allen and within Annie Hall itself, to dismiss her facility with romantic comedy as simply turning on the charm – even if she was, of course, highly charismatic.

Shifting Genres

The film famously functioned as Allen’s transition between broader, joke-heavy films and a more naturalistic style. Consequently, it has numerous jokes, imaginative scenes, and a freewheeling patchwork of a romantic memory alongside sharp observations into a doomed romantic relationship. Keaton, similarly, led an evolution in Hollywood love stories, playing neither the screwball-era speed-talker or the bombshell ditz popularized in the 1950s. Instead, she fuses and merges traits from both to invent a novel style that seems current today, halting her assertiveness with uncertain moments.

Watch, for example the moment when Annie and Alvy first connect after a match of tennis, stumbling through reciprocal offers for a lift (even though only just one drives). The exchange is rapid, but veers erratically, with Keaton navigating her nervousness before ending up stuck of “la di da”, a expression that captures her quirky unease. The movie physicalizes that feeling in the following sequence, as she has indifferent conversation while driving recklessly through city avenues. Subsequently, she finds her footing delivering the tune in a club venue.

Dimensionality and Independence

These are not instances of the character’s unpredictability. Across the film, there’s a dimensionality to her gentle eccentricity – her hippie-hangover willingness to try drugs, her panic over lobsters and spiders, her unwillingness to be shaped by Alvy’s efforts to shape her into someone outwardly grave (which for him means death-obsessed). At first, Annie could appear like an strange pick to receive acclaim; she is the love interest in a movie seen from a man’s point of view, and the main pair’s journey doesn’t lead to either changing enough to make it work. Yet Annie does change, in aspects clear and mysterious. She just doesn’t become a more suitable partner for Alvy. 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 trend. After her working relationship with Woody finished, she took a break from rom-coms; Baby Boom is essentially her sole entry from the complete 1980s period. But during her absence, the film Annie Hall, the character perhaps moreso than the unconventional story, became a model for the style. Star Meg Ryan, for example, credits much of her love story success to Keaton’s skill to portray intelligence and flightiness together. This made Keaton seem like a everlasting comedy royalty despite her real roles being matrimonial parts (whether happily, as in the movie Father of the Bride, or not as much, as in the film The First Wives Club) and/or mothers (see that Christmas movie or that mother-daughter story) than independent ladies in love. Even in her reunion with Allen, they’re a established married pair drawn nearer by comic amateur sleuthing – and she slips into that role easily, beautifully.

However, Keaton also enjoyed an additional romantic comedy success in 2003 with the film Something’s Gotta Give, as a playwright in love with a older playboy (Jack Nicholson, naturally). The result? One more Oscar recognition, and a complete niche of love stories where senior actresses (often portrayed by famous faces, but still!) take charge of their destinies. Part of the reason her death seems like such a shock is that she kept producing such films as recently as last year, a frequent big-screen star. Now audiences will be pivoting from assuming her availability to realizing what an enormous influence she was on the romantic comedy as it exists today. Should it be difficult to recall present-day versions of such actresses who walk in her shoes, that’s probably because it’s seldom for a star of her talent to dedicate herself to a category that’s often just online content for a recent period.

An Exceptional Impact

Reflect: there are 10 living female actors who have been nominated multiple times. It’s rare for one of those roles to originate in a romantic comedy, let alone half of them, as was the example of Keaton. {Because her