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Many great performers have starred in romantic comedies. Typically, when aiming to win an Oscar, they have to reach for more serious roles. The late Diane Keaton, who died unexpectedly, took an opposite path and executed it with effortless grace. Her first major film role was in The Godfather, about as serious an American masterpiece as ever created. Yet in the same year, she revisited the character of Linda, the object of a nerdy hero’s affection, in a movie version of Broadway’s Play It Again, Sam. She persistently switched heavy films with romantic comedies across the seventies, and the lighter fare that secured her the Oscar for outstanding actress, altering the genre for good.

The Award-Winning Performance

The Oscar statuette was for Annie Hall, helmed and co-scripted by Woody Allen, with Keaton portraying Annie, part of the film’s broken romance. The director and star were once romantically involved before making the film, and continued as pals until her passing; when speaking publicly, Keaton described Annie as a dream iteration of herself, through Allen’s eyes. It might be simple, then, to assume Keaton’s performance involves doing what came naturally. But there’s too much range in Keaton’s work, both between her Godfather performance and her funny films with Allen and inside Annie Hall alone, to discount her skill with romantic comedy as merely exuding appeal – even if she was, of course, incredibly appealing.

Shifting Genres

The film famously functioned as Allen’s transition between broader, joke-heavy films and a realistic approach. As such, it has numerous jokes, fantasy sequences, and a improvised tapestry of a relationship memoir mixed with painful truths into a doomed romantic relationship. Keaton, similarly, oversaw a change in Hollywood love stories, portraying neither the fast-talking screwball type or the bombshell ditz popularized in the 1950s. Instead, she mixes and matches elements from each to invent a novel style that seems current today, interrupting her own boldness with uncertain moments.

Watch, for example the moment when Annie and Alvy initially hit it off after a game on the courts, awkwardly exchanging proposals for a car trip (although only a single one owns a vehicle). The dialogue is quick, but zig-zags around unpredictably, with Keaton navigating her unease before ending up stuck of her whimsical line, a words that embody her quirky unease. The film manifests that sensibility in the next scene, as she makes blasé small talk while operating the car carelessly through city avenues. Subsequently, she finds her footing delivering the tune in a cabaret.

Dimensionality and Independence

These are not instances of Annie being unstable. Across the film, there’s a complexity to her playful craziness – her post-hippie openness to try drugs, her anxiety about sea creatures and insects, her unwillingness to be shaped by Alvy’s efforts to turn her into someone outwardly grave (which for him means focused on dying). In the beginning, Annie might seem like an strange pick to win an Oscar; she plays the female lead in a film told from a male perspective, and the main pair’s journey fails to result in adequate growth accommodate the other. Yet Annie does change, in aspects clear and mysterious. She just doesn’t become a more compatible mate for her co-star. Many subsequent love stories took the obvious elements – neurotic hang-ups, odd clothing – without quite emulating Annie’s ultimate independence.

Ongoing Legacy and Senior Characters

Possibly she grew hesitant of that trend. Post her professional partnership with Allen ended, she paused her lighthearted roles; the film Baby Boom is practically her single outing from the complete 1980s period. Yet while she was gone, the film Annie Hall, the persona even more than the unconventional story, became a model for the style. 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 matrimonial parts (be it joyfully, as in the movie Father of the Bride, or not as much, as in that ensemble comedy) and/or parental figures (see the holiday film The Family Stone or that mother-daughter story) than unattached women finding romance. Even in her reunion with the director, they’re a established married pair drawn nearer by comic amateur sleuthing – and she fits the character effortlessly, gracefully.

However, Keaton also enjoyed another major rom-com hit in 2003 with Something’s Gotta Give, as a dramatist in love with a older playboy (Jack Nicholson, naturally). The result? Her final Oscar nomination, and a complete niche of romantic tales where older women (typically acted by celebrities, but still!) reassert their romantic and/or social agency. Part of the reason her death seems like such a shock is that she kept producing those movies up until recently, a constant multiplex presence. Today viewers must shift from expecting her roles to grasping the significant effect she was on the funny romance as we know it. Is it tough to imagine modern equivalents of those earlier stars who similarly follow in Keaton’s footsteps, that’s probably because it’s uncommon for an actor of her talent to commit herself to a category that’s often just online content for a recent period.

An Exceptional Impact

Consider: there are a dozen performing women who have been nominated multiple times. It’s unusual for a single part to begin in a rom-com, let alone half of them, as was the case for Keaton. {Because her