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Many great female actors have starred in love stories with humor. Usually, if they want to win an Oscar, they have to reach for dramatic parts. Diane Keaton, whose recent passing occurred, took an opposite path and executed it with disarmingly natural. Her debut significant performance was in The Godfather, about as serious an cinematic masterpiece as ever created. But that 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 regularly juggled intense dramas with lighthearted romances throughout the ’70s, and it was the latter that won her an Oscar for best actress, altering the genre for good.

The Academy Award Part

The award was for Annie Hall, written and directed by Woody Allen, with Keaton in the lead role, one half of the movie’s fractured love story. Allen and Keaton dated previously before production, and continued as pals until her passing; during conversations, Keaton had characterized Annie as a perfect image of herself, from Allen’s perspective. It would be easy, then, to assume Keaton’s performance involves doing what came naturally. Yet her breadth in Keaton’s work, both between her Godfather performance and her Allen comedies and within Annie Hall itself, to underestimate her talent with funny romances as just being charming – although she remained, of course, highly charismatic.

Evolving Comedy

Annie Hall famously served as Allen’s transition between more gag-based broad comedies and a authentic manner. Therefore, it has lots of humor, dreamlike moments, and a freewheeling patchwork of a romantic memory alongside sharp observations into a fated love affair. Keaton, similarly, oversaw a change in U.S. romantic comedies, playing neither the rapid-fire comic lead or the glamorous airhead common in the fifties. On the contrary, she blends and combines aspects of both to forge a fresh approach that seems current today, interrupting her own boldness with nervous pauses.

Watch, for example the sequence with the couple initially hit it off after a game on the courts, fumbling over ping-ponging invitations for a ride (although only one of them has a car). The exchange is rapid, but veers erratically, with Keaton navigating her nervousness before ending up stuck of that famous phrase, a words that embody her quirky unease. The film manifests that tone in the following sequence, as she engages in casual chat while operating the car carelessly through New York roads. Later, she finds her footing singing It Had to Be You in a nightclub.

Depth and Autonomy

This is not evidence of Annie being unstable. Across the film, there’s a complexity to her gentle eccentricity – her post-hippie openness to experiment with substances, her panic over lobsters and spiders, her resistance to control by Alvy’s attempts to shape her into someone outwardly grave (in his view, that signifies focused on dying). At first, Annie might seem like an strange pick to earn an award; she’s the romantic lead in a story filtered through a man’s eyes, and the main pair’s journey fails to result in either changing enough to make it work. Yet Annie does change, in ways both observable and unknowable. She merely avoids becoming a more suitable partner for her co-star. Plenty of later rom-coms stole the superficial stuff – neurotic hang-ups, eccentric styles – failing to replicate Annie’s ultimate independence.

Lasting Influence and Later Roles

Perhaps Keaton felt cautious of that pattern. Post her professional partnership with Allen concluded, she paused her lighthearted roles; her movie Baby Boom is essentially her sole entry from the whole decade of the eighties. But during her absence, Annie Hall, the persona even more than the free-form film, emerged as a template for the style. Actress Meg Ryan, for example, credits much of her love story success to Keaton’s ability to embody brains and whimsy at once. This made Keaton seem like a timeless love story icon while she was in fact portraying matrimonial parts (whether happily, as in that family comedy, or more strained, as in that ensemble comedy) and/or mothers (see that Christmas movie or the comedy Because I Said So) than independent ladies in love. Even in her reunion with Allen, they’re a long-married couple united more deeply by comic amateur sleuthing – and she slips into that role smoothly, wonderfully.

Yet Diane experienced another major rom-com hit in two thousand three with that Nancy Meyers movie, as a dramatist in love with a younger-dating cad (the star Jack Nicholson, naturally). The outcome? Her final Oscar nomination, and a entire category of romantic tales where mature females (typically acted by celebrities, but still!) reassert their romantic and/or social agency. Part of the reason her death seems like such a shock is that she kept producing such films just last year, a regular cinema fixture. Now fans are turning from expecting her roles to grasping the significant effect she was on the rom-com genre as it is recognized. If it’s harder to think of contemporary counterparts of Meg Ryan or Goldie Hawn who emulate her path, the reason may be it’s rare for a performer of her talent to dedicate herself to a category that’s often just online content for a recent period.

An Exceptional Impact

Consider: there are ten active actresses who have been nominated multiple times. It’s rare for one of those roles to start in a light love story, not to mention multiple, as was the case for Keaton. {Because her