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Numerous talented actresses have appeared in love stories with humor. Typically, should they desire to earn an Academy Award, they must turn for weightier characters. The late Diane Keaton, who passed away recently, charted a different course and made it look seamless ease. Her debut significant performance was in The Godfather, as dramatic an cinematic masterpiece as has ever been made. But that same year, she reprised the part of Linda, the focus of an awkward lead’s admiration, in a movie version of the stage play Play It Again, Sam. She regularly juggled heavy films with romantic comedies across the seventies, and it was the latter that secured her the Oscar for leading actress, transforming the category forever.

The Oscar-Winning Role

That Oscar 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 until her passing; in interviews, Keaton described Annie as a perfect image of herself, through Allen’s eyes. It would be easy, then, to believe her portrayal involves doing what came naturally. But there’s too much range in her performances, both between her Godfather performance and her funny films with Allen and throughout that very movie, to dismiss her facility with romantic comedy as just being charming – though she was, of course, tremendously charming.

Evolving Comedy

The film famously functioned as Allen’s shift between slapstick-oriented movies and a more naturalistic style. Therefore, it has numerous jokes, fantasy sequences, and a improvised tapestry of a romantic memory alongside sharp observations into a fated love affair. 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. On the contrary, she mixes and matches aspects of both to invent a novel style that seems current today, interrupting her own boldness with uncertain moments.

Observe, for instance the sequence with the couple initially bond after a match of tennis, fumbling over ping-ponging invitations for a ride (despite the fact that only just one drives). The dialogue is quick, but meanders unexpectedly, with Keaton maneuvering through her own discomfort before winding up in a cul-de-sac of “la di da”, a words that embody her nervous whimsy. The film manifests that tone in the following sequence, as she has indifferent conversation while operating the car carelessly through New York roads. Later, she centers herself singing It Had to Be You in a cabaret.

Complexity and Freedom

These aren’t examples of Annie acting erratic. Across the film, there’s a depth to her gentle eccentricity – her lingering counterculture curiosity to try drugs, her panic over lobsters and spiders, her resistance to control by Alvy’s efforts to mold her into someone more superficially serious (which for him means death-obsessed). Initially, Annie might seem like an unusual choice to win an Oscar; she’s the romantic lead in a film told from a male perspective, and the main pair’s journey doesn’t bend toward either changing enough to make it work. However, she transforms, in manners visible and hidden. She simply fails to turn into a more suitable partner for the male lead. Plenty of later rom-coms borrowed the surface traits – anxious quirks, quirky fashions – not fully copying her core self-reliance.

Lasting Influence and Later Roles

Perhaps Keaton felt cautious of that pattern. Following her collaboration with Allen concluded, she stepped away from romantic comedies; Baby Boom is practically her single outing from the entirety of the 1980s. However, in her hiatus, the character Annie, the character perhaps moreso than the unconventional story, became a model for the category. Meg Ryan, for example, is largely indebted for her comedic roles to Keaton’s skill to play smart and flibbertigibbet simultaneously. This cast Keaton as like a timeless love story icon while she was in fact portraying matrimonial parts (whether happily, as in that family comedy, or less so, as in The First Wives Club) and/or moms (see that Christmas movie or Because I Said So) than independent ladies in love. Even during her return with Woody Allen, they’re a seasoned spouses united more deeply by humorous investigations – and she slips into that role smoothly, wonderfully.

But Keaton did have a further love story triumph in 2003 with the film Something’s Gotta Give, as a dramatist in love with a younger-dating cad (actor Jack Nicholson, naturally). The result? Her last Academy Award nod, and a whole subgenre of romances where mature females (usually played by movie stars, but still!) take charge of their destinies. One factor her loss is so startling is that Keaton was still making these stories up until recently, a frequent big-screen star. Now fans are turning from taking that presence for granted to realizing what an enormous influence she was on the romantic comedy as it is recognized. If it’s harder to think of contemporary counterparts of Meg Ryan or Goldie Hawn who walk in her shoes, the reason may be it’s seldom for a star of her talent to commit herself to a genre that’s often just online content for a long time.

A Unique Legacy

Ponder: there are a dozen performing women who earned several Oscar nods. It’s rare for one of those roles to originate in a romantic comedy, especially not several, as was the example of Keaton. {Because her