Starting with Annie Hall to the movie Something’s Gotta Give: Diane Keaton Was the Archetypal Rom-Com Royalty.

Plenty of great actresses have performed in love stories with humor. Usually, if they want to receive Oscar recognition, they need to shift for weightier characters. Diane Keaton, who died unexpectedly, took an opposite path and pulled it off with effortless grace. Her initial breakout part was in The Godfather, as weighty an film classic as ever produced. However, concurrently, she revisited the character of Linda, the focus of an awkward lead’s admiration, in a cinematic take of Broadway’s Play It Again, Sam. She regularly juggled serious dramas with romantic comedies across the seventies, and it was the latter that earned her the Academy Award for leading actress, transforming the category forever.

The Oscar-Winning Role

That Oscar was for the film Annie Hall, co-written and directed by Allen, with Keaton in the lead role, part of the film’s broken romance. Allen and Keaton dated previously before making the film, and continued as pals for the rest of her life; during conversations, Keaton described Annie as a dream iteration of herself, through Allen’s eyes. It would be easy, then, to believe her portrayal involves doing what came naturally. Yet her breadth in her acting, both between her Godfather performance and her Allen comedies and within Annie Hall itself, to underestimate her talent with funny romances as just being charming – though she was, of course, highly charismatic.

Shifting Genres

Annie Hall famously served as Allen’s transition between more gag-based broad comedies and a realistic approach. Consequently, it has numerous jokes, dreamlike moments, and a freewheeling patchwork of a love story recollection in between some stinging insights into a ill-fated romance. In a similar vein, Diane, led an evolution in Hollywood love stories, portraying neither the screwball-era speed-talker or the glamorous airhead common in the fifties. Rather, she blends and combines traits from both to create something entirely new that feels modern even now, halting her assertiveness with uncertain moments.

Observe, for instance the moment when Annie and Alvy initially bond after a match of tennis, awkwardly exchanging proposals for a car trip (even though only one of them has a car). The exchange is rapid, but veers erratically, with Keaton navigating her unease before winding up in a cul-de-sac of that famous phrase, a phrase that encapsulates her anxious charm. The movie physicalizes that feeling in the subsequent moment, as she makes blasé small talk while operating the car carelessly through city avenues. Later, she composes herself delivering the tune in a nightclub.

Depth and Autonomy

These are not instances of Annie acting erratic. During the entire story, there’s a complexity to her playful craziness – her post-hippie openness to experiment with substances, her panic over lobsters and spiders, her unwillingness to be shaped by Alvy’s attempts to mold her into someone more superficially serious (which for him means focused on dying). At first, the character may look like an odd character to earn an award; she plays the female lead in a movie seen from a man’s point of view, and the central couple’s arc fails to result in either changing enough to suit each other. Yet Annie does change, in ways both observable and unknowable. She just doesn’t become a more suitable partner for her co-star. Numerous follow-up films stole the superficial stuff – nervous habits, quirky fashions – not fully copying Annie’s ultimate independence.

Ongoing Legacy and Senior Characters

Maybe Keaton was wary of that trend. After her working relationship with Allen concluded, she took a break from rom-coms; Baby Boom is practically her single outing from the complete 1980s period. However, in her hiatus, the character Annie, the character perhaps moreso than the loosely structured movie, emerged as a template for the category. Meg Ryan, for example, owes most of her rom-com career to Keaton’s ability to portray intelligence and flightiness together. This made Keaton seem like a everlasting comedy royalty while she was in fact portraying more wives (be it joyfully, as in that family comedy, or not as much, as in that ensemble comedy) and/or mothers (see The Family Stone or that mother-daughter story) than independent ladies in love. Even during her return with Allen, they’re a long-married couple united more deeply by comic amateur sleuthing – and she fits the character easily, beautifully.

Yet Diane experienced a further love story triumph in 2003 with the film Something’s Gotta Give, as a writer in love with a younger-dating cad (Jack Nicholson, naturally). What happened? One more Oscar recognition, and a complete niche of love stories where mature females (usually played by movie stars, but still!) take charge of their destinies. Part of the reason her death seems like such a shock is that she kept producing such films as recently as last year, a frequent big-screen star. Now fans are turning from assuming her availability to understanding the huge impact she was on the romantic comedy as we know it. Should it be difficult to recall present-day versions of such actresses who walk in her shoes, that’s probably because it’s seldom for a star of her talent to commit herself to a category that’s often just online content for a while now.

A Special Contribution

Consider: there are a dozen performing women who have been nominated multiple times. It’s unusual for a single part to originate in a romantic comedy, not to mention multiple, as was the situation with Diane. {Because her