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Many talented female actors have starred in romantic comedies. Usually, when aiming to earn an Academy Award, they have to reach for weightier characters. Diane Keaton, who passed away recently, followed a reverse trajectory and pulled it off with disarmingly natural. Her first major film role was in the classic The Godfather, as weighty an cinematic masterpiece as ever created. Yet in the same year, she reprised the part of Linda, the focus of an awkward lead’s admiration, in a movie version of Broadway’s Play It Again, Sam. She regularly juggled serious dramas with romantic comedies throughout the ’70s, and it was the latter that won her an Oscar for outstanding actress, altering the genre for good.

The Award-Winning Performance

The Oscar statuette was for Annie Hall, co-written and directed by Allen, with Keaton as the title character, a component of the couple’s failed relationship. The director and star had been in a romantic relationship prior to filming, and remained close friends throughout her life; during conversations, Keaton had characterized Annie as an idealized version of herself, as seen by Allen. It would be easy, then, to think her acting meant being herself. However, her versatility in Keaton’s work, contrasting her dramatic part and her Allen comedies and within Annie Hall itself, to dismiss her facility with romantic comedy as simply turning on the charm – even if she was, of course, incredibly appealing.

Shifting Genres

Annie Hall famously served as the director’s evolution between more gag-based broad comedies and a more naturalistic style. As such, it has plenty of gags, dreamlike moments, and a freewheeling patchwork of a love story recollection in between some stinging insights into a fated love affair. Keaton, similarly, presides over a transition in U.S. romantic comedies, playing neither the rapid-fire comic lead or the glamorous airhead popularized in the 1950s. Instead, she fuses and merges traits from both to create something entirely new that still reads as oddly contemporary, interrupting her own boldness with uncertain moments.

Observe, for instance the scene where Annie and Alvy Singer initially hit it off after a match of tennis, fumbling over ping-ponging invitations for a ride (despite the fact that only a single one owns a vehicle). The dialogue is quick, but meanders unexpectedly, with Keaton maneuvering through her unease before winding up in a cul-de-sac of that famous phrase, a words that embody her quirky unease. The story embodies that tone in the next scene, as she makes blasé small talk while navigating wildly through New York roads. Afterward, she composes herself performing the song in a club venue.

Complexity and Freedom

This is not evidence of the character’s unpredictability. Across the film, there’s a complexity to her playful craziness – her post-hippie openness to experiment with substances, her panic over lobsters and spiders, her refusal to be manipulated by the protagonist’s tries to shape her into someone outwardly grave (for him, that implies preoccupied with mortality). At first, the character may look like an odd character to receive acclaim; she’s the romantic lead in a film told from a male perspective, and the central couple’s arc fails to result in sufficient transformation accommodate the other. Yet Annie does change, in aspects clear and mysterious. She just doesn’t become a more suitable partner for the male lead. Many subsequent love stories borrowed the surface traits – anxious quirks, eccentric styles – failing to replicate her final autonomy.

Ongoing Legacy and Senior Characters

Possibly she grew hesitant of that pattern. After her working relationship with Allen concluded, she took a break from rom-coms; the film Baby Boom is essentially her sole entry from the complete 1980s period. But during her absence, the character Annie, the character perhaps moreso than the unconventional story, became a model for the genre. Actress Meg Ryan, for example, credits much of her love story success to Diane’s talent to embody brains and whimsy at once. This made Keaton seem like a everlasting comedy royalty even as she was actually playing more wives (be it joyfully, as in the movie Father of the Bride, or not as much, as in The First Wives Club) and/or moms (see The Family Stone or the comedy Because I Said So) than unattached women finding romance. Even in her comeback with the director, they’re a long-married couple drawn nearer by humorous investigations – and she eases into the part easily, beautifully.

However, Keaton also enjoyed another major rom-com hit in two thousand three with that Nancy Meyers movie, as a writer in love with a younger-dating cad (the star Jack Nicholson, naturally). The outcome? Her last Academy Award nod, and a entire category of romantic tales where mature females (often portrayed by famous faces, but still!) take charge of their destinies. Part of the reason her death seems like such a shock is that she kept producing these stories 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 funny romance as it exists today. Should it be difficult to recall modern equivalents of those earlier stars who similarly follow in Keaton’s footsteps, that’s likely since it’s uncommon for an actor of her talent to commit 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 begin in a rom-com, especially not several, as was the case for Keaton. {Because her