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Many great actresses have appeared in love stories with humor. Ordinarily, if they want to earn an Academy Award, they have to reach for weightier characters. Diane Keaton, whose recent passing occurred, took an opposite path and made it look disarmingly natural. Her debut significant performance was in the classic The Godfather, as dramatic an American masterpiece as has ever been made. But that same year, she revisited the character of Linda, the love interest of a geeky protagonist, in a movie version of the stage play Play It Again, Sam. She persistently switched heavy films with lighthearted romances across the seventies, and the lighter fare that secured her the Oscar for best actress, transforming the category forever.

The Academy Award Part

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. The director and star were once romantically involved before production, and continued as pals until her passing; during conversations, Keaton had characterized Annie as a dream iteration of herself, from Allen’s perspective. One could assume, then, to think her acting meant being herself. However, her versatility in her acting, both between her Godfather performance and her Allen comedies and throughout that very movie, to underestimate her talent with romantic comedy as just being charming – although she remained, of course, highly charismatic.

A Transition in Style

Annie Hall notably acted as Allen’s shift between broader, joke-heavy films and a realistic approach. As such, it has lots of humor, fantasy sequences, and a loose collage of a romantic memory in between some stinging insights into a doomed romantic relationship. Keaton, similarly, presides over a transition in U.S. romantic comedies, portraying neither the screwball-era speed-talker or the glamorous airhead common in the fifties. On the contrary, she fuses and merges aspects of both to forge a fresh approach that feels modern even now, cutting her confidence short with nervous pauses.

See, as an example the sequence with the couple initially bond after a game on the courts, stumbling through reciprocal offers for a lift (even though only one of them has a car). The banter is fast, but zig-zags around unpredictably, with Keaton maneuvering through her unease before ending up stuck of her whimsical line, a phrase that encapsulates her nervous whimsy. The movie physicalizes that tone in the next scene, as she has indifferent conversation while operating the car carelessly through New York roads. Later, she finds her footing singing It Had to Be You in a nightclub.

Complexity and Freedom

This is not evidence of Annie acting erratic. Throughout the movie, there’s a complexity to her gentle eccentricity – her lingering counterculture curiosity to experiment with substances, her fear of crustaceans and arachnids, her unwillingness to be shaped by the protagonist’s tries to shape her into someone apparently somber (in his view, that signifies focused on dying). Initially, Annie might seem like an odd character to receive acclaim; she’s the romantic lead in a film told from a male perspective, and the protagonists’ trajectory doesn’t bend toward sufficient transformation to suit each other. Yet Annie does change, in manners visible and hidden. She simply fails to turn into a more suitable partner for the male lead. Many subsequent love stories stole the superficial stuff – anxious quirks, eccentric styles – without quite emulating Annie’s ultimate independence.

Ongoing Legacy and Senior Characters

Possibly she grew hesitant of that tendency. After her working relationship with Allen ended, she paused her lighthearted roles; the film Baby Boom is practically her single outing from the whole decade of the eighties. But during her absence, the character Annie, the character perhaps moreso than the unconventional story, emerged as a template for the category. Actress Meg Ryan, for example, is largely indebted for her comedic roles to Diane’s talent to play smart and flibbertigibbet simultaneously. This rendered Keaton like a permanent rom-com queen despite her real roles being married characters (be it joyfully, as in the movie Father of the Bride, or not as much, as in that ensemble comedy) and/or moms (see that Christmas movie or Because I Said So) than independent ladies in love. Even during her return with Woody Allen, they’re a seasoned spouses united more deeply by humorous investigations – and she eases into the part effortlessly, gracefully.

However, Keaton also enjoyed another major rom-com hit in 2003 with the film Something’s Gotta Give, as a dramatist in love with a older playboy (the star Jack Nicholson, naturally). The outcome? Her last Academy Award nod, and a whole subgenre of romantic tales where senior actresses (typically acted by celebrities, but still!) reassert their romantic and/or social agency. A key element her loss is so startling is that she kept producing these stories as recently as last year, a regular cinema fixture. Today viewers must shift from assuming her availability to realizing what an enormous influence she was on the romantic comedy as we know it. If it’s harder to think of modern equivalents of Meg Ryan or Goldie Hawn who emulate her path, that’s probably because it’s uncommon for an actor of Keaton’s skill to dedicate herself to a style that’s frequently reduced to digital fare for a recent period.

A Unique Legacy

Consider: there are a dozen performing women who earned several Oscar nods. It’s rare for one of those roles to begin in a rom-com, especially not several, as was the example of Keaton. {Because her