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Plenty of accomplished performers have starred in romantic comedies. Typically, should they desire to earn an Academy Award, they need to shift for dramatic parts. Diane Keaton, whose recent passing occurred, followed a reverse trajectory and executed it with effortless grace. Her initial breakout part was in the classic The Godfather, as weighty an film classic as ever created. However, concurrently, she reprised the part of the character Linda, the love interest of a geeky protagonist, in a cinematic take of the stage play Play It Again, Sam. She continued to alternate serious dramas with lighthearted romances across the seventies, and the comedies that earned her the Academy Award for best actress, changing the genre permanently.

The Oscar-Winning Role

The Oscar statuette was for the film Annie Hall, written and directed by Woody Allen, with Keaton as the title character, a component of the couple’s failed relationship. The director and star had been in a romantic relationship before production, and remained close friends for the rest of her life; when speaking publicly, Keaton had characterized Annie as an idealized version of herself, from Allen’s perspective. It would be easy, then, to believe her portrayal involves doing what came naturally. But there’s too much range in her performances, from her Godfather role and her funny films with Allen and inside Annie Hall alone, to dismiss her facility with romantic comedy as simply turning on the charm – though she was, of course, tremendously charming.

Evolving Comedy

Annie Hall famously served as the director’s evolution between broader, joke-heavy films and a authentic manner. As such, it has lots of humor, imaginative scenes, and a freewheeling patchwork of a relationship memoir alongside sharp observations into a ill-fated romance. In a similar vein, Diane, led an evolution in American rom-coms, embodying neither the fast-talking screwball type or the bombshell ditz popularized in the 1950s. On the contrary, she fuses and merges aspects of both to create something entirely new that still reads as oddly contemporary, cutting her confidence short with nervous pauses.

Watch, for example the sequence with the couple first connect after a match of tennis, stumbling through reciprocal offers for a car trip (even though only a single one owns a vehicle). The dialogue is quick, but meanders unexpectedly, with Keaton maneuvering through her nervousness before ending up stuck of her whimsical line, a words that embody her anxious charm. The story embodies that sensibility in the subsequent moment, as she engages in casual chat while operating the car carelessly through city avenues. Later, she composes herself singing It Had to Be You in a club venue.

Complexity and Freedom

These aren’t examples of Annie acting erratic. During the entire story, there’s a complexity to her light zaniness – her post-hippie openness to experiment with substances, her anxiety about sea creatures and insects, her refusal to be manipulated by Alvy’s efforts to turn her into someone outwardly grave (in his view, that signifies focused on dying). In the beginning, the character may look like an odd character 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 adequate growth to make it work. Yet Annie does change, in manners visible and hidden. She just doesn’t become a better match for Alvy. Many subsequent love stories took the obvious elements – anxious quirks, eccentric styles – not fully copying Annie’s ultimate independence.

Enduring Impact and Mature Parts

Perhaps Keaton felt cautious of that pattern. After her working relationship with Woody finished, she stepped away from romantic comedies; Baby Boom is essentially her sole entry from the whole decade of the eighties. Yet while she was gone, Annie Hall, the persona even more than the free-form film, served as a blueprint for the style. Meg Ryan, for example, is largely indebted for her comedic roles to Diane’s talent to embody brains and whimsy at once. This rendered Keaton like a permanent rom-com queen while she was in fact portraying married characters (if contentedly, as in the movie Father of the Bride, or less so, as in The First Wives Club) and/or mothers (see the holiday film The Family Stone or Because I Said So) than independent ladies in love. Even in her reunion with Woody Allen, they’re a established married pair brought closer together by comic amateur sleuthing – and she fits the character effortlessly, gracefully.

However, Keaton also enjoyed an additional romantic comedy success in the year 2003 with Something’s Gotta Give, as a dramatist in love with a man who dates younger women (the star Jack Nicholson, naturally). What happened? One more Oscar recognition, and a entire category of romantic tales where mature females (often portrayed by famous faces, but still!) reassert their romantic and/or social agency. One factor her loss is so startling is that Diane continued creating those movies up until recently, a regular cinema fixture. Now audiences will be pivoting from assuming her availability 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 Meg Ryan or Goldie Hawn who similarly follow in Keaton’s footsteps, the reason may be it’s seldom for a star of her talent to dedicate herself to a genre that’s mostly been streaming fodder for a long time.

A Special Contribution

Ponder: there are ten active actresses who earned several Oscar nods. It’s rare for one of those roles to start in a light love story, especially not several, as was the situation with Diane. {Because her