From the film Annie Hall all the way to Something’s Gotta Give: the actress Diane Keaton Was the Definitive Queen of Comedy.
Numerous great female actors have appeared in rom-coms. Typically, should they desire to earn an Academy Award, they have to reach for weightier characters. The late Diane Keaton, whose recent passing occurred, charted a different course and made it look disarmingly natural. Her first major film role was in The Godfather, as dramatic an American masterpiece as ever created. However, concurrently, she returned to the role of Linda, the love interest of a geeky protagonist, in a cinematic take of the theatrical production Play It Again, Sam. She persistently switched intense dramas with lighthearted romances across the seventies, and it was the latter that earned her the Academy Award for outstanding actress, transforming the category forever.
The Award-Winning Performance
That Oscar was for the film Annie Hall, helmed and co-scripted by Woody Allen, with Keaton in the lead role, a component of the couple’s failed relationship. The director and star had been in a romantic relationship before production, and stayed good friends throughout her life; during conversations, Keaton had characterized Annie as a dream iteration of herself, as seen by Allen. It might be simple, then, to believe her portrayal meant being herself. But there’s too much range in Keaton’s work, contrasting her dramatic part and her Allen comedies and throughout that very movie, to discount her skill with romantic comedy as simply turning on the charm – though she was, of course, incredibly appealing.
Evolving Comedy
Annie Hall notably acted as the director’s evolution between broader, joke-heavy films and a more naturalistic style. As such, it has lots of humor, dreamlike moments, and a improvised tapestry of a relationship memoir mixed with painful truths into a ill-fated romance. Likewise, Keaton, presides over a transition in U.S. romantic comedies, embodying neither the rapid-fire comic lead or the bombshell ditz popularized in the 1950s. On the contrary, she blends and combines aspects of both to forge a fresh approach that seems current today, halting her assertiveness with her own false-start hesitations.
Watch, for example the scene where Annie and Alvy Singer initially hit it off after a match of tennis, fumbling over ping-ponging invitations for a car trip (although only just one drives). The dialogue is quick, but meanders unexpectedly, with Keaton soloing around her own discomfort before winding up in a cul-de-sac of that famous phrase, a expression that captures her quirky unease. The film manifests that sensibility in the next scene, as she engages in casual chat while driving recklessly through New York roads. Subsequently, she composes herself delivering the tune in a nightclub.
Dimensionality and Independence
This is not evidence of the character’s unpredictability. During the entire story, there’s a dimensionality to her gentle eccentricity – her post-hippie openness to try drugs, her fear of crustaceans and arachnids, her unwillingness to be shaped by the protagonist’s tries to turn her into someone outwardly grave (for him, that implies focused on dying). Initially, Annie could appear like an odd character to win an Oscar; she’s the romantic lead in a movie seen from a man’s point of view, and the main pair’s journey doesn’t lead to adequate growth to make it work. However, she transforms, in aspects clear and mysterious. She just doesn’t become a more compatible mate for her co-star. Numerous follow-up films took the obvious elements – anxious quirks, odd clothing – failing to replicate Annie’s ultimate independence.
Enduring Impact and Mature Parts
Perhaps Keaton felt cautious of that tendency. Post her professional partnership with Woody finished, she paused her lighthearted roles; the film Baby Boom is really her only one from the entirety of the 1980s. Yet while she was gone, the character Annie, the persona even more than the loosely structured movie, served as a blueprint for the genre. Meg Ryan, for example, owes most of her rom-com career to Keaton’s ability to portray intelligence and flightiness together. This rendered Keaton like a permanent rom-com queen despite her real roles being married characters (be it joyfully, as in Father of the Bride, or more strained, as in the film The First Wives Club) and/or parental figures (see the holiday film 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 drawn nearer by comic amateur sleuthing – and she fits the character smoothly, wonderfully.
Yet Diane experienced a further love story triumph in 2003 with that Nancy Meyers movie, as a dramatist in love with a younger-dating cad (Jack Nicholson, naturally). What happened? Her final Oscar nomination, and a entire category of love stories where senior actresses (often portrayed by famous faces, but still!) reclaim their love lives. One factor her death seems like such a shock is that Keaton was still making these stories up until recently, a constant multiplex presence. Now audiences will be pivoting from assuming her availability to realizing what an enormous influence she was on the funny romance as it exists today. Should it be difficult to recall present-day versions of those earlier stars who walk in her shoes, that’s probably because it’s seldom for a star of her caliber to dedicate herself to a genre that’s frequently reduced to digital fare for a while now.
A Unique Legacy
Ponder: 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
