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Plenty of talented performers have performed in love stories with humor. Usually, should they desire to receive Oscar recognition, they must turn for dramatic parts. The late Diane Keaton, who died unexpectedly, followed a reverse trajectory and pulled it off with disarmingly natural. Her debut significant performance was in The Godfather, as weighty an American masterpiece as ever created. But that same year, she returned to the role of the character Linda, the focus of an awkward lead’s admiration, in a movie version of the stage play Play It Again, Sam. She continued to alternate serious dramas with romantic comedies throughout the ’70s, and the lighter fare that won her an Oscar for best actress, transforming the category forever.

The Academy Award Part

The award was for the film Annie Hall, helmed and co-scripted by Woody Allen, with Keaton portraying Annie, one half of the movie’s fractured love story. The director and star were once romantically involved prior to filming, and continued as pals until her passing; during conversations, Keaton had characterized Annie as a perfect image of herself, through Allen’s eyes. It would be easy, then, to believe her portrayal meant being herself. Yet her breadth in her acting, both between her Godfather performance and her funny films with Allen and inside Annie Hall alone, to dismiss her facility with funny romances as simply turning on the charm – even if she was, of course, highly charismatic.

Shifting Genres

Annie Hall famously served as the director’s evolution between broader, joke-heavy films and a realistic approach. Therefore, it has lots of humor, imaginative scenes, and a improvised tapestry of a love story recollection in between some stinging insights into a doomed romantic relationship. Keaton, similarly, oversaw a change in Hollywood love stories, playing neither the screwball-era speed-talker or the glamorous airhead popularized in the 1950s. On the contrary, she mixes and matches elements from each to invent a novel style that still reads as oddly contemporary, halting her assertiveness with nervous pauses.

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 a single one owns a vehicle). The exchange is rapid, but zig-zags around unpredictably, with Keaton soloing around her unease before concluding with of her whimsical line, a phrase that encapsulates her anxious charm. The story embodies that feeling in the following sequence, as she engages in casual chat while driving recklessly through New York roads. Subsequently, she centers herself delivering the tune in a club venue.

Dimensionality and Independence

This is not evidence of Annie acting erratic. Throughout the movie, there’s a depth to her light zaniness – her lingering counterculture curiosity to try drugs, her anxiety about sea creatures and insects, her refusal to be manipulated by the protagonist’s tries to mold her into someone more superficially serious (which for him means preoccupied with mortality). At first, Annie might seem like an unusual choice to earn an award; she’s the romantic lead in a film told from a male perspective, and the protagonists’ trajectory doesn’t lead to adequate growth accommodate the other. But Annie evolves, in manners visible and hidden. She simply fails to turn into a more compatible mate for the male lead. Plenty of later rom-coms stole the superficial stuff – anxious quirks, odd clothing – not fully copying her core self-reliance.

Enduring Impact and Mature Parts

Maybe Keaton was wary of that tendency. Post her professional partnership with Allen ended, she stepped away from romantic comedies; her movie Baby Boom is practically her single outing from the whole decade of the eighties. However, in her hiatus, Annie Hall, the character perhaps moreso than the loosely structured movie, served as a blueprint 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 cast Keaton as like a everlasting comedy royalty while she was in fact portraying matrimonial parts (if contentedly, as in that family comedy, or not as much, as in the film The First Wives Club) and/or moms (see the holiday film The Family Stone or Because I Said So) than single gals falling in love. Even in her comeback with the director, they’re a seasoned spouses brought closer together by humorous investigations – and she fits the character easily, beautifully.

Yet Diane experienced an additional romantic comedy success in the year 2003 with the film Something’s Gotta Give, as a writer in love with a man who dates younger women (the star Jack Nicholson, naturally). The outcome? Her last Academy Award nod, and a entire category of romantic tales where older women (often portrayed by famous faces, but still!) reassert their romantic and/or social agency. Part of the reason her passing feels so sudden is that she kept producing those movies up until recently, a constant multiplex presence. Today viewers must shift from assuming her availability to grasping the significant effect she was on the funny romance as we know it. Is it tough to imagine modern equivalents of Meg Ryan or Goldie Hawn who walk in her shoes, that’s likely since it’s seldom for a star of Keaton’s skill to commit herself to a category that’s often just online content for a while now.

A Unique Legacy

Reflect: there are ten active actresses who have been nominated multiple times. It’s unusual for a single part to originate in a romantic comedy, not to mention multiple, as was the example of Keaton. {Because her