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Plenty of accomplished female actors have performed in love stories with humor. Typically, should they desire to receive Oscar recognition, they have to reach for dramatic parts. The late Diane Keaton, whose recent passing occurred, followed a reverse trajectory and pulled it off with disarmingly natural. Her first major film role was in The Godfather, as weighty an American masterpiece as has ever been made. However, concurrently, she reprised the part of the character Linda, the focus of an awkward lead’s admiration, in a movie version of the stage play Play It Again, Sam. She continued to alternate serious dramas with lighthearted romances throughout the ’70s, and it was the latter that won her an Oscar for outstanding actress, changing the genre permanently.

The Award-Winning Performance

The Oscar statuette was for the film Annie Hall, co-written and directed by Allen, with Keaton portraying Annie, one half of the movie’s fractured love story. The director and star had been in a romantic relationship before making the film, and continued as pals for the rest of her life; in interviews, Keaton portrayed Annie as a perfect image of herself, as seen by Allen. It might be simple, then, to think her acting involves doing what came naturally. However, her versatility in her performances, contrasting her dramatic part and her funny films with Allen and within Annie Hall itself, to underestimate her talent with funny romances as simply turning on the charm – though she was, of course, incredibly appealing.

A Transition in Style

Annie Hall famously served as Allen’s transition between slapstick-oriented movies and a more naturalistic style. As such, it has numerous jokes, fantasy sequences, and a loose collage of a relationship memoir mixed with painful truths into a fated love affair. Keaton, similarly, led an evolution in Hollywood love stories, portraying neither the fast-talking screwball type or the bombshell ditz famous from the ’50s. Instead, she mixes and matches elements from each to forge a fresh approach that still reads as oddly contemporary, halting her assertiveness with her own false-start hesitations.

Observe, for instance the moment when Annie and Alvy first connect after a game on the courts, fumbling over ping-ponging invitations for a lift (although only a single one owns a vehicle). The banter is fast, but veers erratically, with Keaton navigating her unease before winding up in a cul-de-sac of her whimsical line, a words that embody her nervous whimsy. The story embodies that sensibility in the subsequent moment, as she has indifferent conversation while operating the car carelessly through city avenues. Afterward, she centers herself delivering the tune in a cabaret.

Complexity and Freedom

This is not evidence of Annie being unstable. Throughout the movie, there’s a dimensionality to her gentle eccentricity – her lingering counterculture curiosity to experiment with substances, her anxiety about sea creatures and insects, her unwillingness to be shaped by Alvy’s efforts to mold her into someone more superficially serious (which for him means death-obsessed). In the beginning, the character may look like an strange pick to earn an award; she is the love interest in a story filtered through a man’s eyes, and the main pair’s journey fails to result in either changing enough accommodate the other. However, she transforms, in aspects clear and mysterious. She simply fails to turn into a better match for Alvy. Many subsequent love stories borrowed the surface traits – nervous habits, eccentric styles – failing to replicate Annie’s ultimate independence.

Lasting Influence and Later Roles

Maybe Keaton was wary of that tendency. Post her professional partnership with Allen concluded, she stepped away from romantic comedies; Baby Boom is essentially her sole entry from the entirety of the 1980s. Yet while she was gone, Annie Hall, the character perhaps moreso than the loosely structured movie, emerged as a template for the style. Actress Meg Ryan, for example, is largely indebted for her comedic roles to Keaton’s ability to embody brains and whimsy at once. This rendered Keaton like a permanent rom-com queen despite her real roles being matrimonial parts (be it joyfully, as in Father of the Bride, or less so, as in the film The First Wives Club) and/or moms (see The Family Stone or Because I Said So) than unattached women finding romance. Even during her return with Allen, they’re a long-married couple brought closer together by funny detective work – and she slips into that role easily, beautifully.

However, Keaton also enjoyed an additional romantic comedy success in 2003 with that Nancy Meyers movie, as a dramatist in love with a man who dates younger women (actor Jack Nicholson, naturally). The result? Her last Academy Award nod, and a entire category of love stories where older women (often portrayed by famous faces, but still!) reassert their romantic and/or social agency. Part of the reason her death seems like such a shock is that Diane continued creating these stories just last year, a frequent big-screen star. Today viewers must shift from taking that presence for granted to understanding the huge impact she was on the funny romance as it exists today. If it’s harder to think of modern equivalents of such actresses who similarly follow in Keaton’s footsteps, that’s likely since it’s rare for a performer of her talent to commit herself to a genre that’s frequently reduced to digital fare for a recent period.

An Exceptional Impact

Ponder: there are 10 living female actors who have been nominated multiple times. It’s unusual for a single part to begin in a rom-com, not to mention multiple, as was the example of Keaton. {Because her