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Plenty of accomplished female actors have appeared in rom-coms. Ordinarily, if they want to win an Oscar, they have to reach for more serious roles. Diane Keaton, who passed away recently, took an opposite path and made it look seamless ease. Her debut significant performance was in the classic The Godfather, as weighty an cinematic masterpiece as ever created. Yet in the same year, she revisited the character of the character Linda, the focus of an awkward lead’s admiration, in a movie version of the theatrical production Play It Again, Sam. She continued to alternate intense dramas with funny love stories during the 1970s, and the lighter fare that secured her the Oscar for best actress, changing the genre permanently.

The Academy Award Part

That Oscar was for the film Annie Hall, co-written and directed by Allen, with Keaton portraying Annie, a component of the couple’s failed relationship. The director and star had been in a romantic relationship before making the film, and remained close friends until her passing; when speaking publicly, Keaton described Annie as an idealized version of herself, as seen by Allen. It would be easy, then, to think her acting involves doing what came naturally. However, her versatility in her acting, from her Godfather role and her funny films with Allen and inside Annie Hall alone, to underestimate her talent with romantic comedy as just being charming – although she remained, of course, incredibly appealing.

A Transition in Style

Annie Hall famously served as the director’s evolution between slapstick-oriented movies and a authentic manner. Consequently, it has plenty of gags, imaginative scenes, and a improvised tapestry of a love story recollection mixed with painful truths into a doomed romantic relationship. Likewise, Keaton, oversaw a change in American rom-coms, playing neither the screwball-era speed-talker or the sexy scatterbrain common in the fifties. Rather, she mixes and matches aspects of both to forge a fresh approach that still reads as oddly contemporary, halting her assertiveness with her own false-start hesitations.

Observe, for instance the sequence with the couple initially hit it off after a match of tennis, stumbling through reciprocal offers for a ride (even though only one of them has a car). The dialogue is quick, but meanders unexpectedly, with Keaton soloing around her nervousness before ending up stuck of “la di da”, a words that embody her quirky unease. The film manifests that feeling in the next scene, as she has indifferent conversation while operating the car carelessly through Manhattan streets. Subsequently, she finds her footing delivering the tune in a nightclub.

Dimensionality and Independence

These are not instances of Annie being unstable. Across the film, there’s a dimensionality to her gentle eccentricity – her lingering counterculture curiosity to try drugs, her panic over lobsters and spiders, her unwillingness to be shaped by Alvy’s efforts to turn her into someone more superficially serious (which for him means death-obsessed). Initially, Annie could appear like an unusual choice to win an Oscar; she is the love interest in a film told from a male perspective, and the central couple’s arc doesn’t lead to sufficient transformation to suit each other. But Annie evolves, in manners visible and hidden. She just doesn’t become a more compatible mate for the male lead. Many subsequent love stories borrowed the surface traits – nervous habits, quirky fashions – failing to replicate Annie’s ultimate independence.

Lasting Influence and Later Roles

Perhaps Keaton felt cautious of that pattern. Following her collaboration with Woody finished, she took a break from rom-coms; the film Baby Boom is essentially her sole entry from the whole decade of the eighties. But during her absence, the film Annie Hall, the persona even more than the free-form film, became a model for the style. Actress Meg Ryan, for example, is largely indebted for her comedic roles to Diane’s talent to embody brains and whimsy at once. This cast Keaton as like a permanent rom-com queen despite her real roles being married characters (if contentedly, as in Father of the Bride, or less so, as in the film The First Wives Club) and/or parental figures (see The Family Stone or the comedy Because I Said So) than unattached women finding romance. Even in her reunion with the director, they’re a long-married couple drawn nearer by funny detective work – and she eases into the part effortlessly, gracefully.

However, Keaton also enjoyed another major rom-com hit in the year 2003 with the film Something’s Gotta Give, as a playwright in love with a man who dates younger women (Jack Nicholson, naturally). What happened? One more Oscar recognition, and a whole subgenre of love stories where senior actresses (typically acted by celebrities, but still!) reclaim their love lives. A key element her passing feels so sudden is that Diane continued creating these stories just last year, a frequent big-screen star. Today viewers must shift from assuming her availability to understanding the huge impact she was on the romantic comedy as it exists today. Should it be difficult to recall present-day versions of Meg Ryan or Goldie Hawn who walk in her shoes, that’s probably because it’s uncommon for an actor of her talent to devote herself to a genre that’s frequently reduced to digital fare for a recent period.

A Special Contribution

Ponder: there are a dozen performing women who have been nominated multiple times. It’s uncommon for any performance to begin in a rom-com, not to mention multiple, as was the example of Keaton. {Because her