Plenty of accomplished female actors have appeared in rom-coms. Usually, if they want to earn an Academy Award, they need to shift for dramatic parts. Diane Keaton, who died unexpectedly, charted a different course and made it look disarmingly natural. Her debut significant performance was in The Godfather, about as serious an film classic as ever produced. But that same year, she revisited the character of the character Linda, the object of a nerdy hero’s affection, in a cinematic take of the stage play Play It Again, Sam. She regularly juggled heavy films with romantic comedies across the seventies, and the comedies that secured her the Oscar for best actress, transforming the category forever.
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 were once romantically involved prior to filming, and remained close friends until her passing; when speaking publicly, Keaton portrayed Annie as an idealized version of herself, from Allen’s perspective. It might be simple, then, to believe her portrayal meant being herself. But there’s too much range in her acting, contrasting her dramatic part and her comedic collaborations and within Annie Hall itself, to dismiss her facility with romantic comedy as merely exuding appeal – although she remained, of course, highly charismatic.
Annie Hall notably acted as the director’s evolution between slapstick-oriented movies and a realistic approach. As such, it has plenty of gags, fantasy sequences, and a freewheeling patchwork of a romantic memory alongside sharp observations into a doomed romantic relationship. Likewise, Keaton, oversaw a change in Hollywood love stories, portraying neither the fast-talking screwball type or the glamorous airhead common in the fifties. Rather, she mixes and matches traits from both to create something entirely new that still reads as oddly contemporary, interrupting her own boldness with nervous pauses.
Observe, for instance the sequence with the couple initially hit it off after a game on the courts, awkwardly exchanging proposals for a ride (even though only a single one owns a vehicle). The dialogue is quick, but zig-zags around unpredictably, with Keaton soloing around her nervousness before concluding with of her whimsical line, a words that embody her anxious charm. The story embodies that sensibility in the next scene, as she has indifferent conversation while operating the car carelessly through New York roads. Subsequently, she composes herself singing It Had to Be You in a cabaret.
These are not instances of Annie being unstable. Across the film, there’s a depth to her playful craziness – her post-hippie openness to sample narcotics, her fear of crustaceans and arachnids, her unwillingness to be shaped by Alvy’s attempts to shape her into someone more superficially serious (for him, that implies death-obsessed). At first, Annie could appear like an unusual choice to win an Oscar; she is the love interest in a story filtered through a man’s eyes, and the protagonists’ trajectory doesn’t bend toward either changing enough accommodate the other. However, she transforms, in manners visible and hidden. She simply fails to turn into a more suitable partner for the male lead. Numerous follow-up films stole the superficial stuff – neurotic hang-ups, quirky fashions – without quite emulating her final autonomy.
Perhaps Keaton felt cautious of that pattern. Following her collaboration with Allen ended, she took a break from rom-coms; Baby Boom is essentially her sole entry from the entirety of the 1980s. However, in her hiatus, the film Annie Hall, the role possibly more than the unconventional story, served as a blueprint for the category. Actress Meg Ryan, for example, owes most of her rom-com career to Diane’s talent to embody brains and whimsy at once. This rendered Keaton like a timeless love story icon even as she was actually playing married characters (whether happily, as in Father of the Bride, or not as much, as in the film The First Wives Club) and/or parental figures (see The Family Stone or the comedy Because I Said So) than unattached women finding romance. Even in her comeback with Woody Allen, they’re a long-married couple united more deeply by funny detective work – and she fits the character effortlessly, gracefully.
But Keaton did have another major rom-com hit in two thousand three with Something’s Gotta Give, as a writer in love with a older playboy (Jack Nicholson, naturally). The outcome? One more Oscar recognition, and a whole subgenre of romantic tales where senior actresses (typically acted by celebrities, but still!) reassert their romantic and/or social agency. One factor her loss is so startling is that Diane continued creating such films as recently as last year, a regular cinema fixture. Now fans are turning from expecting her roles to grasping the significant effect she was on the funny romance as we know it. If it’s harder to think of present-day versions of Meg Ryan or Goldie Hawn who similarly follow in Keaton’s footsteps, that’s probably because it’s seldom for a star of her talent to commit herself to a genre that’s frequently reduced to digital fare for a long time.
Ponder: there are ten active actresses who earned several Oscar nods. It’s uncommon for any performance to start in a light love story, especially not several, as was the example of Keaton. {Because her
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