From Annie Hall all the way to the movie Something’s Gotta Give: Diane Keaton Emerged as the Definitive Rom-Com Royalty.

Plenty of great actresses have appeared in love stories with humor. Typically, should they desire to receive Oscar recognition, they have to reach for dramatic parts. The late Diane Keaton, who died unexpectedly, charted a different course and made it look disarmingly natural. Her first major film role was in The Godfather, as dramatic an American masterpiece as has ever been made. Yet in the same year, she returned to the role of the character Linda, the focus of an awkward lead’s admiration, in a film adaptation of Broadway’s Play It Again, Sam. She continued to alternate intense dramas with funny love stories across the seventies, and it was the latter that secured her the Oscar for outstanding actress, changing the genre permanently.

The Award-Winning Performance

The award was for Annie Hall, helmed and co-scripted by Woody Allen, with Keaton in the lead role, part of the film’s broken romance. The director and star were once romantically involved prior to filming, and remained close friends for the rest of her life; when speaking publicly, Keaton described Annie as a dream iteration of herself, through Allen’s eyes. It might be simple, then, to think her acting involves doing what came naturally. Yet her breadth in her acting, from her Godfather role and her comedic collaborations and within Annie Hall itself, to discount her skill with rom-coms as simply turning on the charm – though she was, of course, highly charismatic.

Evolving Comedy

The film famously functioned as Allen’s shift between broader, joke-heavy films and a more naturalistic style. Therefore, it has plenty of gags, imaginative scenes, and a improvised tapestry of a relationship memoir in between some stinging insights into a ill-fated romance. In a similar vein, Diane, presides over a transition in Hollywood love stories, playing neither the screwball-era speed-talker or the glamorous airhead common in the fifties. Rather, she fuses and merges elements from each to forge a fresh approach that still reads as oddly contemporary, interrupting her own boldness with her own false-start hesitations.

See, as an example the scene where Annie and Alvy Singer initially bond after a tennis game, fumbling over ping-ponging invitations for a ride (although only one of them has a car). The exchange is rapid, but meanders unexpectedly, with Keaton maneuvering through her own discomfort before ending up stuck of “la di da”, a expression that captures her nervous whimsy. The story embodies that sensibility in the subsequent moment, as she engages in casual chat while driving recklessly through New York roads. Subsequently, she finds her footing singing It Had to Be You in a cabaret.

Complexity and Freedom

This is not evidence of Annie being unstable. Across the film, there’s a complexity to her light zaniness – her lingering counterculture curiosity to try drugs, her anxiety about sea creatures and insects, her refusal to be manipulated by the protagonist’s tries to mold her into someone more superficially serious (which for him means focused on dying). At first, Annie could appear like an strange pick to receive acclaim; she’s the romantic lead in a film told from a male perspective, and the protagonists’ trajectory fails to result in sufficient transformation accommodate the other. Yet Annie does change, in manners visible and hidden. She merely avoids becoming a better match for Alvy. Numerous follow-up films stole the superficial stuff – nervous habits, eccentric styles – without quite emulating Annie’s ultimate independence.

Lasting Influence and Later Roles

Possibly she grew hesitant of that pattern. Post her professional partnership with Woody finished, she took a break from rom-coms; her movie Baby Boom is really her only one from the complete 1980s period. Yet while she was gone, the film Annie Hall, the role possibly more than the free-form film, became a model for the category. 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 matrimonial parts (if contentedly, as in that family comedy, or not as much, 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 the director, they’re a seasoned spouses brought closer together by humorous investigations – and she eases into the part smoothly, wonderfully.

However, Keaton also enjoyed an additional romantic comedy success in two thousand three with that Nancy Meyers movie, as a playwright in love with a older playboy (actor Jack Nicholson, naturally). The result? One more Oscar recognition, and a complete niche of romances where senior actresses (often portrayed by famous faces, but still!) reclaim their love lives. A key element her passing feels so sudden is that Diane continued creating such films just 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 it exists today. Is it tough to imagine modern equivalents of those earlier stars who emulate her path, the reason may be it’s seldom for a star of Keaton’s skill to devote herself to a category that’s often just online content for a while now.

An Exceptional Impact

Consider: there are ten active actresses who received at least four best actress nominations. It’s rare for one of those roles to begin in a rom-com, especially not several, as was the situation with Diane. {Because her