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Plenty of great female actors have performed in romantic comedies. Ordinarily, if they want to earn an Academy Award, they need to shift for weightier characters. The late Diane Keaton, whose recent passing occurred, took an opposite path and pulled it off with seamless ease. Her debut significant performance was in the classic The Godfather, as dramatic an cinematic masterpiece as has ever been made. Yet in the same year, she revisited the character of Linda, the love interest of a geeky protagonist, in a film adaptation of the stage play Play It Again, Sam. She persistently switched serious dramas with lighthearted romances throughout the ’70s, and the lighter fare that earned her the Academy Award for leading actress, transforming the category forever.

The Oscar-Winning Role

That Oscar was for Annie Hall, co-written and directed by Allen, with Keaton in the lead role, one half of the movie’s fractured love story. Allen and Keaton were once romantically involved before production, and stayed good friends for the rest of her life; in interviews, Keaton had characterized Annie as a dream iteration of herself, through Allen’s eyes. One could assume, then, to assume Keaton’s performance required little effort. But there’s too much range in her acting, contrasting her dramatic part and her Allen comedies and inside Annie Hall alone, to discount her skill with rom-coms as just being charming – although she remained, of course, highly charismatic.

Evolving Comedy

The film famously functioned as the director’s evolution between slapstick-oriented movies and a more naturalistic style. Consequently, it has lots of humor, imaginative scenes, and a loose collage of a romantic memory alongside sharp observations into a doomed romantic relationship. Likewise, Keaton, oversaw a change in Hollywood love stories, embodying neither the screwball-era speed-talker or the glamorous airhead popularized in the 1950s. On the contrary, she fuses and merges elements from each to invent a novel style that feels modern even now, cutting her confidence short with uncertain moments.

See, as an example the scene where Annie and Alvy Singer initially hit it off after a tennis game, stumbling through reciprocal offers for a car trip (although only one of them has a car). The exchange is rapid, but zig-zags around unpredictably, with Keaton maneuvering through her unease before winding up in a cul-de-sac of her whimsical line, a expression that captures her nervous whimsy. The movie physicalizes that tone in the next scene, as she engages in casual chat while operating the car carelessly through Manhattan streets. Later, she finds her footing delivering the tune in a club venue.

Complexity and Freedom

These are not instances of Annie being unstable. Across the film, there’s a depth to her gentle eccentricity – her hippie-hangover willingness to sample narcotics, her anxiety about sea creatures and insects, her unwillingness to be shaped by Alvy’s attempts to mold her into someone more superficially serious (in his view, that signifies focused on dying). Initially, Annie could appear like an strange pick to receive acclaim; she plays the female lead in a film told from a male perspective, and the central couple’s arc doesn’t bend toward either changing enough to make it work. However, she transforms, in aspects clear and mysterious. She just doesn’t become a more suitable partner for her co-star. Plenty of later rom-coms took the obvious elements – anxious quirks, quirky fashions – without quite emulating her core self-reliance.

Ongoing Legacy and Senior Characters

Perhaps Keaton felt cautious of that pattern. Following her collaboration with Allen ended, she paused her lighthearted roles; Baby Boom is essentially her sole entry from the complete 1980s period. However, in her hiatus, Annie Hall, the persona even more than the unconventional story, emerged as a template for the genre. Star Meg Ryan, for example, owes most of her rom-com career to Diane’s talent to portray intelligence and flightiness together. This made Keaton seem like a everlasting comedy royalty despite her real roles being married characters (whether happily, as in the movie Father of the Bride, or more strained, as in The First Wives Club) and/or moms (see that Christmas movie or that mother-daughter story) than single gals falling in love. Even in her reunion with Allen, they’re a seasoned spouses drawn nearer by comic amateur sleuthing – and she slips into that role effortlessly, gracefully.

However, Keaton also enjoyed an additional romantic comedy success in the year 2003 with Something’s Gotta Give, as a dramatist in love with a older playboy (Jack Nicholson, naturally). What happened? Her last Academy Award nod, and a complete niche of romances where older women (often portrayed by famous faces, but still!) reassert their romantic and/or social agency. One factor her death seems like such a shock is that Keaton was still making those movies up until recently, a frequent big-screen star. Now audiences will be pivoting from expecting her roles to grasping the significant effect she was on the romantic comedy as we know it. Is it tough to imagine contemporary counterparts of those earlier stars who emulate her path, that’s probably because it’s seldom for a star of her talent to devote herself to a genre that’s frequently reduced to digital fare for a recent period.

A Unique Legacy

Reflect: there are a dozen performing women who received at least four best actress nominations. It’s uncommon for any performance to originate in a romantic comedy, let alone half of them, as was the situation with Diane. {Because her