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Numerous talented female actors have appeared in love stories with humor. Usually, should they desire to earn an Academy Award, they need to shift for weightier characters. Diane Keaton, whose recent passing occurred, followed a reverse trajectory and executed it with effortless grace. Her debut significant performance was in the classic The Godfather, as weighty an American masterpiece as ever produced. However, concurrently, she revisited the character of the character Linda, the object of a nerdy hero’s affection, in a movie version of Broadway’s Play It Again, Sam. She regularly juggled intense dramas with funny love stories during the 1970s, and it was the latter that won her an Oscar for leading actress, altering the genre for good.

The Academy Award Part

That Oscar was for the film Annie Hall, written and directed by Woody Allen, with Keaton in the lead role, a component of the couple’s failed relationship. Woody and Diane were once romantically involved before making the film, and stayed good friends until her passing; when speaking publicly, Keaton portrayed Annie as a perfect image of herself, from Allen’s perspective. It might be simple, then, to believe her portrayal involves doing what came naturally. Yet her breadth in Keaton’s work, from her Godfather role and her Allen comedies and within Annie Hall itself, to discount her skill with funny romances as simply turning on the charm – although she remained, of course, highly charismatic.

Shifting Genres

Annie Hall notably acted as the director’s evolution between more gag-based broad comedies and a more naturalistic style. As such, it has numerous jokes, dreamlike moments, and a improvised tapestry of a love story recollection alongside sharp observations into a doomed romantic relationship. Likewise, Keaton, oversaw a change in Hollywood love stories, embodying neither the fast-talking screwball type or the bombshell ditz common in the fifties. On the contrary, she blends and combines aspects of both to create something entirely new that feels modern even now, interrupting her own boldness with uncertain moments.

Observe, for instance the moment when Annie and Alvy initially hit it off after a match of tennis, fumbling over ping-ponging invitations for a ride (even though only one of them has a car). The banter is fast, but zig-zags around unpredictably, with Keaton navigating her own discomfort before ending up stuck of her whimsical line, a expression that captures her anxious charm. The movie physicalizes that tone in the following sequence, as she engages in casual chat while navigating wildly through Manhattan streets. Subsequently, she composes herself performing the song in a club venue.

Depth and Autonomy

This is not evidence of Annie acting erratic. Across the film, there’s a dimensionality to her gentle eccentricity – her lingering counterculture curiosity to try drugs, her anxiety about sea creatures and insects, her resistance to control by the protagonist’s tries to mold her into someone outwardly grave (for him, that implies focused on dying). At first, Annie might seem like an odd character to earn an award; she plays the female lead in a story filtered through a man’s eyes, and the main pair’s journey doesn’t lead to either changing enough to suit each other. Yet Annie does change, in ways both observable and unknowable. She merely avoids becoming a more suitable partner for Alvy. Plenty of later rom-coms took the obvious elements – neurotic hang-ups, eccentric styles – without quite emulating her core self-reliance.

Lasting Influence and Later Roles

Possibly she grew hesitant of that trend. After her working relationship with Woody finished, she took a break from rom-coms; her movie Baby Boom is really her only one from the complete 1980s period. Yet while she was gone, the character Annie, the persona even more than the free-form film, served as a blueprint for the category. Star 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 everlasting comedy royalty while she was in fact portraying matrimonial parts (if contentedly, as in that family comedy, or not as much, as in that ensemble comedy) and/or mothers (see that Christmas movie or the comedy Because I Said So) than single gals falling in love. Even during her return with the director, they’re a established married pair drawn nearer by comic amateur sleuthing – and she eases into the part easily, beautifully.

Yet Diane experienced another major rom-com hit in the year 2003 with that Nancy Meyers movie, as a dramatist in love with a younger-dating cad (Jack Nicholson, naturally). The outcome? Her final Oscar nomination, and a complete niche of romances where mature females (typically acted by celebrities, but still!) take charge of their destinies. Part of the reason her death seems like such a shock is that Keaton was still making such films as recently as last year, a frequent big-screen star. Now audiences will be pivoting from taking that presence for granted to understanding the huge impact she was on the rom-com genre as it is recognized. Is it tough to imagine present-day versions of those earlier stars who emulate her path, that’s probably because it’s rare for a performer of her talent to commit herself to a category that’s mostly been streaming fodder for a recent period.

A Special Contribution

Consider: there are 10 living female actors who earned several Oscar nods. It’s rare for one of those roles to start in a light love story, let alone half of them, as was the situation with Diane. {Because her