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Many great actresses have starred in romantic comedies. Typically, should they desire to earn an Academy Award, they must turn for more serious roles. Diane Keaton, whose recent passing occurred, took an opposite path and made it look disarmingly natural. Her initial breakout part was in the classic The Godfather, as weighty an American masterpiece as ever created. Yet in the same year, she returned to the role of Linda, the love interest of a geeky protagonist, in a film adaptation of the theatrical production Play It Again, Sam. She regularly juggled intense dramas with romantic comedies across the seventies, and the comedies that earned her the Academy Award for leading actress, changing the genre permanently.

The Oscar-Winning Role

The award was for Annie Hall, co-written and directed by 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 prior to filming, and stayed good friends until her passing; when speaking publicly, Keaton portrayed Annie as an idealized version of herself, from Allen’s perspective. One could assume, then, to believe her portrayal meant being herself. Yet her breadth in her performances, contrasting her dramatic part and her comedic collaborations and within Annie Hall itself, to dismiss her facility with rom-coms as just being charming – though she was, of course, highly charismatic.

A Transition in Style

The film famously functioned as the director’s evolution between slapstick-oriented movies and a realistic approach. As such, it has lots of humor, imaginative scenes, and a freewheeling patchwork of a relationship memoir alongside sharp observations into a fated love affair. Keaton, similarly, oversaw a change in American rom-coms, portraying neither the rapid-fire comic lead or the sexy scatterbrain famous from the ’50s. On the contrary, she fuses and merges aspects of both to forge a fresh approach that seems current today, interrupting her own boldness with uncertain moments.

See, as an example the moment when Annie and Alvy first connect after a match of tennis, stumbling through reciprocal offers for a car trip (even though only just one drives). The dialogue is quick, but zig-zags around unpredictably, with Keaton navigating her unease before winding up in a cul-de-sac of her whimsical line, a expression that captures her quirky unease. The movie physicalizes that tone in the following sequence, as she engages in casual chat while operating the car carelessly through New York roads. Later, she centers herself performing the song in a nightclub.

Depth and Autonomy

These are not instances of Annie being unstable. During the entire story, there’s a dimensionality to her playful craziness – her hippie-hangover willingness to sample narcotics, her anxiety about sea creatures and insects, her resistance to control by Alvy’s efforts to mold her into someone apparently somber (for him, that implies death-obsessed). At first, Annie could appear like an unusual choice to receive acclaim; she is the love interest in a movie seen from a man’s point of view, and the central couple’s arc doesn’t lead to either changing enough to suit each other. Yet Annie does change, in aspects clear and mysterious. She merely avoids becoming a better match for her co-star. Plenty of later rom-coms took the obvious elements – anxious quirks, quirky fashions – without quite emulating Annie’s ultimate independence.

Lasting Influence and Later Roles

Perhaps Keaton felt cautious of that tendency. After her working relationship with Allen ended, she took a break from rom-coms; the film Baby Boom is really her only one from the whole decade of the eighties. However, in her hiatus, the character Annie, the character perhaps moreso than the loosely structured movie, became a model for the genre. Actress Meg Ryan, for example, owes most of her rom-com career to Diane’s talent to play smart and flibbertigibbet simultaneously. This cast Keaton as like a permanent rom-com queen even as she was actually playing matrimonial parts (whether happily, as in the movie Father of the Bride, or not as much, as in that ensemble comedy) and/or mothers (see The Family Stone or that mother-daughter story) than unattached women finding romance. Even in her reunion with Woody Allen, they’re a long-married couple drawn nearer by comic amateur sleuthing – and she fits the character effortlessly, gracefully.

But Keaton did have a further love story triumph in 2003 with that Nancy Meyers movie, as a writer in love with a man who dates younger women (actor Jack Nicholson, naturally). The result? Her last Academy Award nod, and a entire category of love stories where mature females (typically acted by celebrities, but still!) reclaim their love lives. A key element her death seems like such a shock is that she kept producing those movies as recently as last year, a regular cinema fixture. Today viewers must shift from assuming her availability to realizing what an enormous influence she was on the romantic comedy as it exists today. If it’s harder to think of present-day versions of those earlier stars who walk in her shoes, that’s probably because it’s uncommon for an actor of Keaton’s skill to dedicate herself to a category that’s frequently reduced to digital fare for a recent period.

A Special Contribution

Ponder: there are a dozen performing women who earned several Oscar nods. It’s uncommon for any performance to begin in a rom-com, not to mention multiple, as was the example of Keaton. {Because her