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Many great performers have starred in rom-coms. Usually, should they desire to win an Oscar, they need to shift for dramatic parts. Diane Keaton, who died unexpectedly, took an opposite path and made it look effortless grace. Her debut significant performance was in The Godfather, as dramatic an film classic as ever produced. But that same year, she revisited the character of Linda, the focus of an awkward lead’s admiration, in a movie version of the stage play Play It Again, Sam. She persistently switched serious dramas with lighthearted romances across the seventies, and the lighter fare that earned her the Academy Award for leading actress, transforming the category forever.

The Academy Award Part

The award was for Annie Hall, helmed and co-scripted by Woody Allen, with Keaton in the lead role, part of the film’s broken romance. Allen and Keaton were once romantically involved before making the film, and stayed good friends throughout her life; in interviews, Keaton had characterized Annie as a perfect image of herself, through Allen’s eyes. It would be easy, then, to believe her portrayal meant being herself. But there’s too much range in her acting, from her Godfather role and her Allen comedies and inside Annie Hall alone, to dismiss her facility with rom-coms as merely exuding appeal – though she was, of course, highly charismatic.

Evolving Comedy

Annie Hall notably acted as the director’s evolution between more gag-based broad comedies and a authentic manner. Therefore, it has lots of humor, imaginative scenes, and a loose collage of a relationship memoir in between some stinging insights into a ill-fated romance. Keaton, similarly, led an evolution in U.S. romantic comedies, portraying neither the screwball-era speed-talker or the sexy scatterbrain common in the fifties. Instead, she mixes and matches aspects of both to forge a fresh approach that feels modern even now, halting her assertiveness with uncertain moments.

See, as an example the moment when Annie and Alvy initially hit it off after a match of tennis, stumbling through reciprocal offers for a car trip (although only just one drives). The dialogue is quick, but veers erratically, with Keaton soloing around her nervousness before ending up stuck of “la di da”, a expression that captures her quirky unease. The film manifests that sensibility in the subsequent moment, as she makes blasé small talk while driving recklessly through New York roads. Afterward, she composes herself singing It Had to Be You in a cabaret.

Dimensionality and Independence

This is not evidence of the character’s unpredictability. Across the film, there’s a complexity to her gentle eccentricity – her hippie-hangover willingness to sample narcotics, her panic over lobsters and spiders, her resistance to control by the protagonist’s tries to turn her into someone outwardly grave (which for him means focused on dying). At first, Annie could appear like an unusual choice to earn an award; she plays the female lead in a story filtered through a man’s eyes, and the protagonists’ trajectory fails to result in either changing enough accommodate the 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 – nervous habits, eccentric styles – failing to replicate Annie’s ultimate independence.

Lasting Influence and Later Roles

Possibly she grew hesitant of that trend. After her working relationship with Woody finished, she stepped away from romantic comedies; Baby Boom is practically her single outing from the entirety of the 1980s. However, in her hiatus, Annie Hall, the character perhaps moreso than the free-form film, became a model for the style. Star Meg Ryan, for example, is largely indebted for her comedic roles to Keaton’s skill to play smart and flibbertigibbet simultaneously. This made Keaton seem like a permanent rom-com queen despite her real roles being married characters (if contentedly, as in that family comedy, or not as much, as in The First Wives Club) and/or mothers (see The Family Stone or that mother-daughter story) than independent ladies in love. Even during her return with Woody Allen, they’re a long-married couple drawn nearer by funny detective work – and she eases into the part easily, beautifully.

But Keaton did have a further love story triumph in the year 2003 with Something’s Gotta Give, as a playwright in love with a older playboy (the star Jack Nicholson, naturally). The result? Her last Academy Award nod, and a complete niche of love stories where older women (often portrayed by famous faces, but still!) take charge of their destinies. One factor her loss is so startling is that Keaton was still making those movies up until recently, a constant multiplex presence. Today viewers must shift from assuming her availability to realizing what an enormous influence she was on the funny romance as it exists today. Should it be difficult to recall present-day versions of Meg Ryan or Goldie Hawn who walk in her shoes, that’s probably because it’s seldom for a star of her caliber to devote herself to a category that’s mostly been streaming fodder for a long time.

A Unique Legacy

Reflect: there are a dozen performing women who have been nominated multiple times. It’s uncommon for any performance to begin in a rom-com, not to mention multiple, as was the case for Keaton. {Because her