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Numerous talented actresses have appeared in love stories with humor. Typically, if they want to earn an Academy Award, they have to reach for weightier characters. The late Diane Keaton, who passed away recently, took an opposite path and made it look effortless grace. Her debut significant performance was in the classic The Godfather, about as serious an cinematic masterpiece as ever produced. But that same year, she revisited the character of Linda, the love interest of a geeky protagonist, in a film adaptation of the theatrical production Play It Again, Sam. She regularly juggled serious dramas with romantic comedies across the seventies, and the lighter fare that won her an Oscar for outstanding actress, changing the genre permanently.

The Academy Award Part

That Oscar was for Annie Hall, written and directed by Woody Allen, with Keaton portraying Annie, one half of the movie’s fractured love story. The director and star had been in a romantic relationship prior to filming, and remained close friends until her passing; in interviews, Keaton had characterized Annie as a dream iteration of herself, from Allen’s perspective. It might be simple, then, to assume Keaton’s performance involves doing what came naturally. Yet her breadth in her performances, from her Godfather role and her comedic collaborations and throughout that very movie, to dismiss her facility with romantic comedy as just being charming – though she was, of course, highly charismatic.

A Transition in Style

The film famously functioned as Allen’s shift between more gag-based broad comedies and a authentic manner. As such, it has numerous jokes, imaginative scenes, and a improvised tapestry of a romantic memory alongside sharp observations into a fated love affair. Keaton, similarly, presides over a transition in Hollywood love stories, portraying neither the fast-talking screwball type or the sexy scatterbrain popularized in the 1950s. Rather, she blends and combines traits from both to forge a fresh approach that seems current today, halting her assertiveness with nervous pauses.

Watch, for example the sequence with the couple initially bond after a game on the courts, fumbling over ping-ponging invitations for a ride (despite the fact that only just one drives). The banter is fast, but veers erratically, with Keaton soloing around her nervousness before winding up in a cul-de-sac of that famous phrase, a words that embody her nervous whimsy. The film manifests that feeling in the following sequence, as she makes blasé small talk while driving recklessly through Manhattan streets. Afterward, she composes herself performing the song in a cabaret.

Depth and Autonomy

This is not evidence of the character’s unpredictability. Across the film, there’s a complexity to her gentle eccentricity – her hippie-hangover willingness to try drugs, her fear of crustaceans and arachnids, her unwillingness to be shaped by the protagonist’s tries to turn her into someone apparently somber (which for him means preoccupied with mortality). Initially, Annie could appear like an strange pick to win an Oscar; she plays the female lead in a movie seen from a man’s point of view, and the central couple’s arc fails to result in either changing enough accommodate the other. However, she transforms, in aspects clear and mysterious. She simply fails to turn into a better match for Alvy. Many subsequent love stories took the obvious elements – anxious quirks, eccentric styles – failing to replicate her final autonomy.

Enduring Impact and Mature Parts

Perhaps Keaton felt cautious of that pattern. Following her collaboration with Allen concluded, she paused her lighthearted roles; Baby Boom is essentially her sole entry from the whole decade of the eighties. 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, is largely indebted for her comedic roles to Diane’s talent to embody brains and whimsy at once. This made Keaton seem like a permanent rom-com queen while she was in fact portraying matrimonial parts (be it joyfully, as in Father of the Bride, or not as much, as in that ensemble comedy) and/or moms (see The Family Stone or Because I Said So) than unattached women finding romance. Even in her comeback with Woody Allen, they’re a long-married couple brought closer together by funny detective work – and she slips into that role 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 older playboy (actor Jack Nicholson, naturally). What happened? Her last Academy Award nod, and a whole subgenre of romantic tales where senior actresses (typically acted by celebrities, but still!) reassert their romantic and/or social agency. A key element her death seems like such a shock is that Keaton was still making such films up until recently, a regular cinema fixture. Today viewers must shift from expecting her roles to grasping the significant effect she was on the rom-com genre as it exists today. Is it tough to imagine present-day versions of such actresses who walk in her shoes, that’s likely since it’s rare for a performer of Keaton’s skill to dedicate herself to a category that’s mostly been streaming fodder for a recent period.

An Exceptional Impact

Reflect: there are ten active actresses who earned several Oscar nods. It’s uncommon for any performance to begin in a rom-com, let alone half of them, as was the case for Keaton. {Because her