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Numerous great actresses have performed in rom-coms. Ordinarily, when aiming to earn an Academy Award, they have to reach for dramatic parts. The late Diane Keaton, who died unexpectedly, took an opposite path and executed it with disarmingly natural. Her initial breakout part was in the classic The Godfather, about as serious an film classic as ever produced. But that same year, she reprised the part of Linda, the object of a nerdy hero’s affection, in a movie version 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 secured her the Oscar for outstanding actress, altering the genre for good.

The Academy Award Part

The Oscar statuette was for Annie Hall, written and directed by Woody Allen, with Keaton in the lead role, a component of the couple’s failed relationship. The director and star were once romantically involved before production, and remained close friends for the rest of her life; during conversations, Keaton portrayed Annie as a perfect image of herself, through Allen’s eyes. One could assume, then, to think her acting meant being herself. However, her versatility in her performances, both between her Godfather performance and her Allen comedies and within Annie Hall itself, to discount her skill with funny romances as just being charming – though she was, of course, tremendously charming.

Shifting Genres

Annie Hall notably acted as Allen’s shift between more gag-based broad comedies and a realistic approach. Therefore, it has numerous jokes, imaginative scenes, and a freewheeling patchwork of a relationship memoir mixed with painful truths into a doomed romantic relationship. Keaton, similarly, presides over a transition in Hollywood love stories, embodying neither the rapid-fire comic lead or the glamorous airhead common in the fifties. Rather, she blends and combines aspects of both to forge a fresh approach that seems current today, halting her assertiveness with uncertain moments.

Observe, for instance the scene where Annie and Alvy Singer first connect after a tennis game, fumbling over ping-ponging invitations for a ride (despite the fact that only one of them has a car). The banter is fast, but zig-zags around unpredictably, with Keaton soloing around her nervousness before winding up in a cul-de-sac of “la di da”, a phrase that encapsulates her nervous whimsy. The film manifests that tone in the following sequence, as she engages in casual chat while operating the car carelessly through New York roads. Subsequently, she composes herself performing the song in a cabaret.

Dimensionality and Independence

These are not instances of Annie being unstable. During the entire story, there’s a depth to her playful craziness – her post-hippie openness to sample narcotics, her anxiety about sea creatures and insects, her resistance to control by Alvy’s attempts to shape her into someone outwardly grave (for him, that implies focused on dying). At first, the character may look like an odd character to win an Oscar; she’s the romantic lead in a story filtered through a man’s eyes, and the protagonists’ trajectory fails to result in sufficient transformation to suit each other. But Annie evolves, in aspects clear and mysterious. She merely avoids becoming a more suitable partner for the male lead. Numerous follow-up films took the obvious elements – nervous habits, odd clothing – failing to replicate her core self-reliance.

Lasting Influence and Later Roles

Perhaps Keaton felt cautious of that tendency. Following her collaboration with Woody finished, she took a break from rom-coms; Baby Boom is practically her single outing from the entirety of the 1980s. Yet while she was gone, the character Annie, the character perhaps moreso than the unconventional story, became a model for the style. Star Meg Ryan, for example, is largely indebted for her comedic roles to Diane’s talent to play smart and flibbertigibbet simultaneously. This made Keaton seem like a timeless love story icon 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 parental figures (see The Family Stone or Because I Said So) than unattached women finding romance. Even during her return with the director, they’re a long-married couple brought closer together by funny detective work – and she slips into that role smoothly, wonderfully.

However, Keaton also enjoyed another major rom-com hit in 2003 with that Nancy Meyers movie, as a playwright in love with a older playboy (the star Jack Nicholson, naturally). The result? One more Oscar recognition, and a whole subgenre of romances where senior actresses (typically acted by celebrities, but still!) reassert their romantic and/or social agency. Part of the reason her passing feels so sudden is that Keaton was still making these stories up until recently, a constant multiplex presence. Today viewers must shift from expecting her roles to realizing what an enormous influence she was on the romantic comedy as it exists today. If it’s harder to think of modern equivalents of such actresses who walk in her shoes, that’s likely since it’s seldom for a star of her caliber to commit herself to a category that’s frequently reduced to digital fare for a recent period.

A Unique Legacy

Ponder: there are 10 living female actors who have been nominated multiple times. It’s unusual for a single part to begin in a rom-com, let alone half of them, as was the situation with Diane. {Because her