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Many accomplished performers have starred in romantic comedies. Typically, if they want to earn an Academy Award, they need to shift for more serious roles. The late Diane Keaton, whose recent passing occurred, followed a reverse trajectory and pulled it off with disarmingly natural. Her first major film role was in the classic The Godfather, about as serious an American masterpiece as has ever been made. Yet in the same year, she returned to the role of Linda, the object of a nerdy hero’s affection, in a film adaptation of Broadway’s Play It Again, Sam. She continued to alternate serious dramas with funny love stories during the 1970s, and it was the latter that secured her the Oscar for best actress, transforming the category forever.

The Award-Winning Performance

The Oscar statuette 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. The director and star had been in a romantic relationship before production, and continued as pals throughout her life; in interviews, Keaton portrayed Annie as an idealized version of herself, through Allen’s eyes. It might be simple, then, to believe her portrayal involves doing what came naturally. However, her versatility in her performances, contrasting her dramatic part and her Allen comedies and inside Annie Hall alone, to underestimate her talent with rom-coms as simply turning on the charm – even if she was, of course, highly charismatic.

Shifting Genres

Annie Hall famously served as the director’s evolution between more gag-based broad comedies and a realistic approach. As such, it has plenty of gags, imaginative scenes, and a loose collage of a love story recollection mixed with painful truths into a doomed romantic relationship. In a similar vein, Diane, led an evolution in American rom-coms, portraying neither the screwball-era speed-talker or the bombshell ditz popularized in the 1950s. Rather, she mixes and matches aspects of both to create something entirely new that still reads as oddly contemporary, halting her assertiveness with her own false-start hesitations.

Watch, for example the scene where Annie and Alvy Singer first connect after a game on the courts, stumbling through reciprocal offers for a lift (although only just one drives). The banter is fast, but veers erratically, with Keaton navigating her unease before winding up in a cul-de-sac of “la di da”, a words that embody her quirky unease. The film manifests that tone in the following sequence, as she makes blasé small talk while driving recklessly through Manhattan streets. Later, she finds her footing performing the song in a cabaret.

Depth and Autonomy

This is not evidence of the character’s unpredictability. Throughout the movie, there’s a complexity to her playful craziness – her post-hippie openness to try drugs, her anxiety about sea creatures and insects, her resistance to control by the protagonist’s tries to turn her into someone more superficially serious (for him, that implies death-obsessed). In the beginning, the character may look like an unusual choice to receive acclaim; she plays the female lead in a film told from a male perspective, and the central couple’s arc doesn’t lead to adequate growth accommodate the other. Yet Annie does change, in ways both observable and unknowable. She merely avoids becoming a more compatible mate for the male lead. Plenty of later rom-coms took the obvious elements – nervous habits, eccentric styles – not fully copying her core self-reliance.

Ongoing Legacy and Senior Characters

Maybe Keaton was wary of that tendency. Following her collaboration with Allen concluded, she stepped away from romantic comedies; her movie Baby Boom is really her only one from the entirety of the 1980s. But during her absence, the film Annie Hall, the persona even more than the unconventional story, emerged as a template for the style. Star Meg Ryan, for example, credits much of her love story success to Diane’s talent to embody brains and whimsy at once. This made Keaton seem like a everlasting comedy royalty while she was in fact portraying more wives (be it joyfully, as in the movie Father of the Bride, or not as much, as in that ensemble comedy) and/or parental figures (see the holiday film The Family Stone or Because I Said So) than independent ladies in love. Even in her comeback with Allen, they’re a seasoned spouses united more deeply by humorous investigations – and she eases into the part smoothly, wonderfully.

However, Keaton also enjoyed a further love story triumph in 2003 with Something’s Gotta Give, as a writer in love with a older playboy (the star Jack Nicholson, naturally). The result? One more Oscar recognition, and a whole subgenre of love stories where older women (typically acted by celebrities, but still!) take charge of their destinies. Part of the reason her loss is so startling is that Keaton was still making such films just last year, a frequent big-screen star. Now audiences will be pivoting from expecting her roles to understanding the huge impact she was on the romantic comedy as it exists today. If it’s harder to think of modern equivalents of Meg Ryan or Goldie Hawn who emulate her path, the reason may be it’s rare for a performer of Keaton’s skill to commit herself to a category that’s mostly been streaming fodder for a long time.

A Special Contribution

Ponder: there are 10 living female actors who received at least four best actress nominations. It’s rare for one of those roles to start in a light love story, let alone half of them, as was the case for Keaton. {Because her