From the film Annie Hall to Something’s Gotta Give: the actress Diane Keaton Was the Quintessential Comedy Queen.
Many great performers have performed in rom-coms. Usually, when aiming to receive Oscar recognition, they need to shift for more serious roles. Diane Keaton, who died unexpectedly, took an opposite path and made it look disarmingly natural. Her initial breakout part was in the classic The Godfather, about as serious an cinematic masterpiece as has ever been made. However, concurrently, she reprised the part of Linda, the love interest of a geeky protagonist, in a cinematic take of Broadway’s Play It Again, Sam. She regularly juggled heavy films with lighthearted romances throughout the ’70s, and the comedies that won her an Oscar for best actress, altering the genre for good.
The Award-Winning Performance
That Oscar was for the film Annie Hall, co-written and directed by Allen, with Keaton as the title character, one half of the movie’s fractured love story. Woody and Diane had been in a romantic relationship before production, and remained close friends for the rest of her life; during conversations, Keaton had characterized Annie as an idealized version of herself, from Allen’s perspective. It might be simple, then, to assume Keaton’s performance required little effort. However, her versatility in her acting, both between her Godfather performance and her comedic collaborations and throughout that very movie, to underestimate her talent with funny romances as just being charming – even if she was, of course, highly charismatic.
Evolving Comedy
Annie Hall famously served as the director’s evolution between slapstick-oriented movies and a realistic approach. Consequently, it has numerous jokes, fantasy sequences, and a freewheeling patchwork of a relationship memoir alongside sharp observations into a ill-fated romance. Likewise, Keaton, oversaw a change in American rom-coms, embodying neither the rapid-fire comic lead or the bombshell ditz famous from the ’50s. Instead, she blends and combines elements from each to forge a fresh approach that still reads as oddly contemporary, cutting her confidence short with nervous pauses.
Observe, for instance the scene where Annie and Alvy Singer first connect after a tennis game, stumbling through reciprocal offers for a car trip (even though only just one drives). The dialogue is quick, but meanders unexpectedly, with Keaton maneuvering through her own discomfort before concluding with of “la di da”, a words that embody her nervous whimsy. The movie physicalizes that tone in the following sequence, as she has indifferent conversation while navigating wildly through city avenues. Later, she finds her footing singing It Had to Be You in a cabaret.
Dimensionality and Independence
These aren’t examples of Annie being unstable. Across the film, there’s a complexity to her gentle eccentricity – her lingering counterculture curiosity to try drugs, her fear of crustaceans and arachnids, her unwillingness to be shaped by Alvy’s attempts to turn her into someone apparently somber (which for him means preoccupied with mortality). At first, Annie might seem like an unusual choice to win an Oscar; she is the love interest in a film told from a male perspective, and the protagonists’ trajectory fails to result in either changing enough to suit each other. However, she transforms, in manners visible and hidden. She just doesn’t become a more compatible mate for Alvy. Numerous follow-up films borrowed the surface traits – anxious quirks, odd clothing – without quite emulating her final autonomy.
Lasting Influence and Later Roles
Possibly she grew hesitant of that tendency. After her working relationship with Woody finished, she stepped away from romantic comedies; her movie Baby Boom is practically her single outing from the whole decade of the eighties. But during her absence, Annie Hall, the persona even more than the unconventional story, became a model for the category. Star Meg Ryan, for example, is largely indebted for her comedic roles to Keaton’s skill to embody brains and whimsy at once. This made Keaton seem like a permanent rom-com queen while she was in fact portraying more wives (if contentedly, as in the movie Father of the Bride, or less so, as in that ensemble comedy) and/or mothers (see The Family Stone or the comedy Because I Said So) than unattached women finding romance. Even during her return with Allen, they’re a established married pair united more deeply by funny detective work – and she fits the character effortlessly, gracefully.
But Keaton did have a further love story triumph in two thousand three with that Nancy Meyers movie, as a playwright in love with a younger-dating cad (Jack Nicholson, naturally). What happened? Her final Oscar nomination, and a complete niche of love stories where senior actresses (usually played by movie stars, but still!) reassert their romantic and/or social agency. One factor her loss is so startling is that Diane continued creating those movies 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 romantic comedy as it is recognized. If it’s harder to think of contemporary counterparts of such actresses who similarly follow in Keaton’s footsteps, the reason may be it’s seldom for a star of her talent to devote herself to a style that’s often just online content for a recent period.
A Special Contribution
Reflect: there are a dozen performing women who received at least four best actress nominations. It’s uncommon for any performance to begin in a rom-com, let alone half of them, as was the situation with Diane. {Because her
