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Numerous talented female actors have starred in romantic comedies. Typically, when aiming to receive Oscar recognition, they have to reach for weightier characters. The late Diane Keaton, whose recent passing occurred, charted a different course and made it look disarmingly natural. Her first major film role was in the classic The Godfather, as dramatic an film classic as ever created. Yet in the same year, she reprised the part of Linda, the love interest of a geeky protagonist, in a film adaptation of the stage play Play It Again, Sam. She continued to alternate heavy films with romantic comedies during the 1970s, and it was the latter that won her an Oscar for outstanding actress, altering the genre for good.

The Award-Winning Performance

The award was for Annie Hall, helmed and co-scripted by Woody Allen, with Keaton portraying Annie, one half of the movie’s fractured love story. Woody and Diane were once romantically involved before production, and continued as pals for the rest of her life; during conversations, Keaton had characterized Annie as a perfect image of herself, through Allen’s eyes. It might be simple, then, to assume Keaton’s performance meant being herself. But there’s too much range in Keaton’s work, contrasting her dramatic part and her Allen comedies and inside Annie Hall alone, to discount her skill with romantic comedy as simply turning on the charm – even if she was, of course, tremendously charming.

Shifting Genres

The film famously functioned as Allen’s shift between slapstick-oriented movies and a more naturalistic style. Therefore, it has lots of humor, fantasy sequences, and a freewheeling patchwork of a relationship memoir in between some stinging insights into a doomed romantic relationship. Likewise, Keaton, led an evolution in U.S. romantic comedies, portraying neither the screwball-era speed-talker or the sexy scatterbrain common in the fifties. Rather, she mixes and matches aspects of both to forge a fresh approach that still reads as oddly contemporary, halting her assertiveness with nervous pauses.

See, as an example the sequence with the couple first connect after a tennis game, awkwardly exchanging proposals for a lift (despite the fact that only a single one owns a vehicle). The banter is fast, but veers erratically, with Keaton navigating her own discomfort before concluding with of that famous phrase, a expression that captures her nervous whimsy. The story embodies that tone in the subsequent moment, as she engages in casual chat while navigating wildly through city avenues. Later, she finds her footing singing It Had to Be You in a club venue.

Depth and Autonomy

These aren’t examples of Annie acting erratic. Throughout the movie, there’s a complexity to her playful craziness – her lingering counterculture curiosity to experiment with substances, her fear of crustaceans and arachnids, her resistance to control by the protagonist’s tries to turn her into someone more superficially serious (in his view, that signifies focused on dying). Initially, Annie could appear like an odd character to earn an award; she is the love interest in a story filtered through a man’s eyes, and the protagonists’ trajectory fails to result in sufficient transformation to make it work. Yet Annie does change, in ways both observable and unknowable. She merely avoids becoming a better match for her co-star. Plenty of later rom-coms borrowed the surface traits – neurotic hang-ups, eccentric styles – failing to replicate Annie’s ultimate independence.

Lasting Influence and Later Roles

Possibly she grew hesitant of that trend. Following her collaboration with Allen ended, she paused her lighthearted roles; her movie Baby Boom is practically her single outing from the whole decade of the eighties. Yet while she was gone, the character Annie, the role possibly more than the loosely structured movie, became a model for the genre. Meg Ryan, for example, is largely indebted for her comedic roles to Keaton’s ability to play smart and flibbertigibbet simultaneously. This cast Keaton as like a permanent rom-com queen despite her real roles being more wives (be it joyfully, as in that family comedy, or not as much, as in The First Wives Club) and/or moms (see The Family Stone or the comedy Because I Said So) than unattached women finding romance. Even during her return with Woody Allen, they’re a seasoned spouses brought closer together by humorous investigations – and she slips into that role easily, beautifully.

Yet Diane experienced an additional romantic comedy success in 2003 with Something’s Gotta Give, as a dramatist in love with a younger-dating cad (the star Jack Nicholson, naturally). The outcome? Her last Academy Award nod, and a entire category of love stories where mature females (often portrayed by famous faces, but still!) take charge of their destinies. One factor her passing feels so sudden is that Keaton was still making these stories up until recently, a constant multiplex presence. Now audiences will be pivoting from taking that presence for granted to understanding the huge impact she was on the funny romance as it exists today. Should it be difficult to recall present-day versions of such actresses who emulate her path, that’s probably because it’s seldom for a star of her talent to dedicate herself to a genre that’s frequently reduced to digital fare for a while now.

An Exceptional Impact

Reflect: there are a dozen performing women who have been nominated multiple times. It’s unusual for a single part to start in a light love story, let alone half of them, as was the example of Keaton. {Because her