Starting with Annie Hall to Something’s Gotta Give: the actress Diane Keaton Was the Definitive Queen of Comedy.
Many great actresses have appeared in romantic comedies. Ordinarily, should they desire to earn an Academy Award, they must turn for weightier characters. The late Diane Keaton, whose recent passing occurred, took an opposite path and made it look disarmingly natural. Her initial breakout part was in The Godfather, as dramatic an American masterpiece as ever produced. But that same year, she returned to the role of Linda, the focus of an awkward lead’s admiration, in a cinematic take of Broadway’s Play It Again, Sam. She continued to alternate heavy films with lighthearted romances during the 1970s, and the comedies that secured her the Oscar for leading actress, transforming the category forever.
The Oscar-Winning Role
The Oscar statuette was for the film Annie Hall, helmed and co-scripted by Woody Allen, with Keaton as the title character, part of the film’s broken romance. Woody and Diane had been in a romantic relationship before production, and remained close friends throughout her life; during conversations, Keaton described Annie as an idealized version of herself, through Allen’s eyes. It would be easy, then, to assume Keaton’s performance required little effort. However, her versatility in Keaton’s work, contrasting her dramatic part and her funny films with Allen and throughout that very movie, to dismiss her facility with romantic comedy as just being charming – even if she was, of course, tremendously charming.
Evolving Comedy
Annie Hall famously served as Allen’s shift between more gag-based broad comedies and a authentic manner. Consequently, it has lots of humor, dreamlike moments, and a loose collage of a love story recollection in between some stinging insights into a ill-fated romance. Keaton, similarly, presides over a transition in American rom-coms, embodying neither the screwball-era speed-talker or the sexy scatterbrain common in the fifties. On the contrary, she fuses and merges traits from both to create something entirely new that still reads as oddly contemporary, halting her assertiveness with uncertain moments.
Watch, for example the moment when Annie and Alvy initially hit it off after a tennis game, awkwardly exchanging proposals for a car trip (despite the fact that only one of them has a car). The exchange is rapid, but veers erratically, with Keaton maneuvering through her nervousness before ending up stuck of that famous phrase, a words that embody her anxious charm. The movie physicalizes that feeling in the next scene, as she makes blasé small talk while navigating wildly through city avenues. Subsequently, she finds her footing delivering the tune in a club venue.
Dimensionality and Independence
This is not evidence of Annie being unstable. Across the film, there’s a complexity to her playful craziness – her post-hippie openness to sample narcotics, her fear of crustaceans and arachnids, her resistance to control by Alvy’s attempts to turn her into someone more superficially serious (in his view, that signifies death-obsessed). Initially, the character may look like an strange pick to receive acclaim; she is the love interest in a movie seen from a man’s point of view, and the main pair’s journey doesn’t lead to adequate growth to suit each other. However, she transforms, in manners visible and hidden. She just doesn’t become a more compatible mate for her co-star. Numerous follow-up films stole the superficial stuff – anxious quirks, quirky fashions – not fully copying Annie’s ultimate independence.
Enduring Impact and Mature Parts
Maybe Keaton was wary of that pattern. Following her collaboration with Allen concluded, she took a break from rom-coms; her movie Baby Boom is essentially her sole entry from the entirety of the 1980s. Yet while she was gone, the film Annie Hall, the character perhaps moreso than the free-form film, served as a blueprint for the genre. Meg Ryan, for example, credits much of her love story success to Keaton’s ability to play smart and flibbertigibbet simultaneously. This rendered Keaton like a permanent rom-com queen while she was in fact portraying matrimonial parts (whether happily, 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 Because I Said So) than independent ladies in love. Even during her return with Allen, they’re a long-married couple drawn nearer by comic amateur sleuthing – and she eases into the part effortlessly, gracefully.
But Keaton did have an additional romantic comedy success in the year 2003 with the film Something’s Gotta Give, as a dramatist in love with a older playboy (actor Jack Nicholson, naturally). The outcome? Her last Academy Award nod, and a complete niche of love stories where mature females (often portrayed by famous faces, but still!) take charge of their destinies. A key element her death seems like such a shock is that Keaton was still making such films as recently as last year, a frequent big-screen star. Now audiences will be pivoting from expecting her roles to grasping the significant effect she was on the rom-com genre as we know it. If it’s harder to think of contemporary counterparts 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 style that’s frequently reduced to digital fare for a recent period.
A Special Contribution
Ponder: there are 10 living female actors who have been nominated multiple times. It’s uncommon for any performance to start in a light love story, let alone half of them, as was the situation with Diane. {Because her
