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Numerous talented performers have performed in love stories with humor. Ordinarily, if they want to win an Oscar, they must turn for weightier characters. Diane Keaton, who died unexpectedly, charted a different course and executed it with seamless ease. Her first major film role was in the classic The Godfather, about as serious an film classic as ever produced. However, concurrently, she reprised the part of the character Linda, the focus of an awkward lead’s admiration, in a film adaptation of Broadway’s Play It Again, Sam. She regularly juggled serious dramas with romantic comedies throughout the ’70s, and the lighter fare that earned her the Academy Award for leading actress, changing the genre permanently.

The Oscar-Winning Role

The award was for the film Annie Hall, helmed and co-scripted 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 before making the film, and remained close friends until her passing; during conversations, Keaton described Annie as a dream iteration of herself, as seen by Allen. It might be simple, then, to believe her portrayal required little effort. But there’s too much range in her performances, both between her Godfather performance and her Allen comedies and inside Annie Hall alone, to discount her skill with romantic comedy as simply turning on the charm – although she remained, of course, tremendously charming.

Shifting Genres

Annie Hall famously served as Allen’s shift between broader, joke-heavy films and a authentic manner. As such, it has lots of humor, imaginative scenes, and a freewheeling patchwork of a romantic memory mixed with painful truths into a ill-fated romance. In a similar vein, Diane, presides over a transition in U.S. romantic comedies, playing neither the fast-talking screwball type or the bombshell ditz common in the fifties. Instead, she mixes and matches elements from each to create something entirely new that still reads as oddly contemporary, halting her assertiveness with uncertain moments.

See, as an example the sequence with the couple initially hit it off after a game on the courts, awkwardly exchanging proposals for a car trip (although only one of them has a car). The dialogue is quick, but zig-zags around unpredictably, with Keaton navigating her unease before winding up in a cul-de-sac of “la di da”, a phrase that encapsulates her quirky unease. The film manifests that tone in the subsequent moment, as she makes blasé small talk while navigating wildly through city avenues. Later, she centers herself delivering the tune in a cabaret.

Dimensionality and Independence

These are not instances of Annie acting erratic. Throughout the movie, there’s a dimensionality to her gentle eccentricity – her post-hippie openness 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 death-obsessed). In the beginning, the character may look like an odd character to receive acclaim; she’s the romantic lead in a film told from a male perspective, and the protagonists’ trajectory doesn’t bend toward sufficient transformation accommodate the other. But Annie evolves, in aspects clear and mysterious. She just doesn’t become a more suitable partner for her co-star. Plenty of later rom-coms borrowed the surface traits – neurotic hang-ups, odd clothing – without quite emulating her final autonomy.

Enduring Impact and Mature Parts

Perhaps Keaton felt cautious of that trend. After her working relationship with Allen concluded, she took a break from rom-coms; the film Baby Boom is essentially her sole entry from the complete 1980s period. However, in her hiatus, Annie Hall, the character perhaps moreso than the unconventional story, emerged as a template for the style. Star Meg Ryan, for example, is largely indebted for her comedic roles to Keaton’s ability to portray intelligence and flightiness together. This rendered Keaton like a permanent rom-com queen despite her real roles being matrimonial parts (be it joyfully, as in the movie 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 that mother-daughter story) than unattached women finding romance. Even in her comeback with Woody Allen, they’re a established married pair united more deeply by funny detective work – and she fits the character effortlessly, gracefully.

Yet Diane experienced a further love story triumph in two thousand three with that Nancy Meyers movie, as a dramatist in love with a man who dates younger women (the star Jack Nicholson, naturally). What happened? Her last Academy Award nod, and a entire category of love stories where mature females (typically acted by celebrities, but still!) take charge of their destinies. One factor her death seems like such a shock is that Keaton was still making those movies up until recently, a regular cinema fixture. Today viewers must shift from taking that presence for granted to understanding the huge impact she was on the rom-com genre as it exists today. Should it be difficult to recall contemporary counterparts of those earlier stars who similarly follow in Keaton’s footsteps, the reason may be it’s seldom for a star of her talent to commit herself to a genre that’s mostly been streaming fodder for a recent period.

A Special Contribution

Reflect: there are a dozen performing women 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 example of Keaton. {Because her