Starting with the film Annie Hall all the way to Something’s Gotta Give: the actress Diane Keaton Was the Definitive Comedy Queen.

Numerous talented actresses have performed in love stories with humor. Typically, when aiming to win an Oscar, they have to reach for more serious roles. Diane Keaton, who passed away recently, took an opposite path and pulled it off with disarmingly natural. Her first major film role was in The Godfather, as dramatic an film classic as ever produced. Yet in the same year, she returned to the role of the character Linda, the love interest of a geeky protagonist, in a movie version of Broadway’s Play It Again, Sam. She continued to alternate intense dramas with funny love stories throughout the ’70s, and it was the latter that secured her the Oscar for leading actress, transforming the category forever.

The Academy Award Part

The award was for the film Annie Hall, co-written and directed by Allen, with Keaton as the title character, part of the film’s broken romance. Allen and Keaton dated previously prior to filming, and continued as pals for the rest of her life; when speaking publicly, Keaton described Annie as an idealized version of herself, as seen by Allen. It would be easy, then, to believe her portrayal required little effort. But there’s too much range in Keaton’s work, contrasting her dramatic part and her comedic collaborations and inside Annie Hall alone, to discount her skill with rom-coms as just being charming – although she remained, of course, incredibly appealing.

Evolving Comedy

Annie Hall notably acted as Allen’s shift between more gag-based broad comedies and a more naturalistic style. As such, it has plenty of gags, fantasy sequences, and a loose collage of a love story recollection mixed with painful truths into a ill-fated romance. Likewise, Keaton, led an evolution in U.S. romantic comedies, playing neither the screwball-era speed-talker or the bombshell ditz common in the fifties. On the contrary, she fuses and merges elements from each to invent a novel style that feels modern even now, interrupting her own boldness with her own false-start hesitations.

Observe, for instance the scene where Annie and Alvy Singer initially hit it off after a tennis game, stumbling through reciprocal offers for a ride (despite the fact that only one of them has a car). The dialogue is quick, but veers erratically, with Keaton soloing around her nervousness before ending up stuck of her whimsical line, a phrase that encapsulates her quirky unease. The film manifests that sensibility in the subsequent moment, as she engages in casual chat while driving recklessly through city avenues. Afterward, she centers herself performing the song in a cabaret.

Depth and Autonomy

These aren’t examples of Annie acting erratic. During the entire story, there’s a dimensionality to her gentle eccentricity – her lingering counterculture curiosity to sample narcotics, her panic over lobsters and spiders, her unwillingness to be shaped by the protagonist’s tries to turn her into someone outwardly grave (in his view, that signifies death-obsessed). In the beginning, Annie might seem like an unusual choice to earn an award; she’s the romantic lead in a movie seen from a man’s point of view, and the protagonists’ trajectory doesn’t lead to either changing enough to make it work. However, she transforms, in aspects clear and mysterious. She merely avoids becoming a better match for her co-star. Numerous follow-up films took the obvious elements – anxious quirks, eccentric styles – failing to replicate Annie’s ultimate independence.

Ongoing Legacy and Senior Characters

Possibly she grew hesitant of that tendency. Post her professional partnership with Allen concluded, she took a break from rom-coms; her movie Baby Boom is practically her single outing from the whole decade of the eighties. However, in her hiatus, Annie Hall, the character perhaps moreso than the free-form film, emerged as a template for the genre. Actress Meg Ryan, for example, credits much of her love story success to Diane’s talent to portray intelligence and flightiness together. This rendered Keaton like a permanent rom-com queen even as she was actually playing more wives (be it joyfully, as in Father of the Bride, or less so, as in The First Wives Club) 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 long-married couple drawn nearer by humorous investigations – and she slips into that role effortlessly, gracefully.

However, Keaton also enjoyed an additional romantic comedy success in the year 2003 with that Nancy Meyers movie, as a playwright in love with a older playboy (Jack Nicholson, naturally). What happened? Her final Oscar nomination, and a entire category of romantic tales 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 she kept producing such films as recently as last year, a regular cinema fixture. Today viewers must shift from assuming her availability to understanding the huge impact she was on the rom-com genre 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, that’s likely since it’s uncommon for an actor of her talent to dedicate herself to a genre that’s frequently reduced to digital fare for a while now.

An Exceptional Impact

Ponder: there are a dozen performing women who earned several Oscar nods. It’s unusual for a single part to originate in a romantic comedy, especially not several, as was the example of Keaton. {Because her