From the film Annie Hall to the movie Something’s Gotta Give: the actress Diane Keaton Was the Definitive Rom-Com Royalty.

Many accomplished actresses have starred in rom-coms. Ordinarily, if they want to receive Oscar recognition, they need to shift for more serious roles. Diane Keaton, whose recent passing occurred, took an opposite path and executed it with disarmingly natural. Her initial breakout part was in The Godfather, as dramatic an film classic as has ever been made. However, concurrently, she returned to the role of the character Linda, the focus of an awkward lead’s admiration, in a film adaptation of the stage play Play It Again, Sam. She continued to alternate serious dramas with lighthearted romances across the seventies, and the comedies that won her an Oscar for outstanding actress, transforming the category forever.

The Academy Award Part

The Oscar statuette was for Annie Hall, co-written and directed by Allen, with Keaton as the title character, one half of the movie’s fractured love story. The director and star dated previously before making the film, and remained close friends throughout her life; when speaking publicly, Keaton portrayed Annie as an idealized version of herself, from Allen’s perspective. It would be easy, then, to think her acting meant being herself. However, her versatility in her performances, from her Godfather role and her funny films with Allen and inside Annie Hall alone, to dismiss her facility with romantic comedy as just being charming – even if she was, of course, tremendously charming.

Evolving Comedy

The film famously functioned as Allen’s transition between more gag-based broad comedies and a more naturalistic style. As such, it has numerous jokes, imaginative scenes, and a loose collage of a love story recollection alongside sharp observations into a ill-fated romance. Keaton, similarly, led an evolution in American rom-coms, embodying neither the rapid-fire comic lead or the bombshell ditz famous from the ’50s. Rather, she mixes and matches aspects of both to forge a fresh approach that still reads as oddly contemporary, interrupting her own boldness with nervous pauses.

Observe, for instance the scene where Annie and Alvy Singer initially hit it off after a match of tennis, stumbling through reciprocal offers for a lift (despite the fact that only a single one owns a vehicle). The exchange is rapid, but zig-zags around unpredictably, with Keaton maneuvering through her own discomfort before concluding with of her whimsical line, a phrase that encapsulates her quirky unease. The story embodies that sensibility in the subsequent moment, as she engages in casual chat while driving recklessly through Manhattan streets. Subsequently, she composes herself delivering the tune in a club venue.

Dimensionality and Independence

This is not evidence of Annie being unstable. Throughout the movie, there’s a complexity to her playful craziness – her hippie-hangover willingness to sample narcotics, her anxiety about sea creatures and insects, her resistance to control by Alvy’s efforts to shape her into someone outwardly grave (in his view, that signifies preoccupied with mortality). At first, Annie could appear like an strange pick to win an Oscar; she is the love interest in a film told from a male perspective, and the central couple’s arc fails to result in either changing enough accommodate the other. Yet Annie does change, in ways both observable and unknowable. She just doesn’t become a more suitable partner for the male lead. Many subsequent love stories took the obvious elements – anxious quirks, quirky fashions – failing to replicate Annie’s ultimate independence.

Lasting Influence and Later Roles

Maybe Keaton was wary of that trend. Post her professional partnership with Woody finished, she stepped away from romantic comedies; Baby Boom is essentially her sole entry from the whole decade of the eighties. But during her absence, the film Annie Hall, the character perhaps moreso than the free-form film, served as a blueprint for the category. Actress Meg Ryan, for example, is largely indebted for her comedic roles to Keaton’s skill to play smart and flibbertigibbet simultaneously. This rendered Keaton like a permanent rom-com queen despite her real roles being matrimonial parts (if contentedly, as in that family comedy, or less so, as in the film The First Wives Club) and/or moms (see that Christmas movie or Because I Said So) than independent ladies in love. Even in her reunion with the director, they’re a long-married couple brought closer together by comic amateur sleuthing – and she eases into the part effortlessly, gracefully.

But Keaton did have a further love story triumph in the year 2003 with the film Something’s Gotta Give, as a dramatist in love with a older playboy (Jack Nicholson, naturally). The outcome? Her last Academy Award nod, and a complete niche of love stories where older women (often portrayed by famous faces, but still!) take charge of their destinies. One factor her passing feels so sudden is that Keaton was still making such films as recently as last year, a regular cinema fixture. Now audiences will be pivoting from expecting her roles to realizing what an enormous influence she was on the romantic comedy as it is recognized. If it’s harder to think of contemporary counterparts of such actresses who emulate her path, that’s probably because it’s seldom for a star of her talent to dedicate herself to a genre that’s often just online content for a while now.

An Exceptional Impact

Ponder: there are a dozen performing women 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 example of Keaton. {Because her