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Many accomplished performers have appeared in rom-coms. Ordinarily, when aiming to earn an Academy Award, they need to shift for weightier characters. Diane Keaton, whose recent passing occurred, took an opposite path and made it look effortless grace. Her debut significant performance was in the classic The Godfather, as dramatic an American masterpiece as ever created. Yet in the same year, she revisited the character of Linda, the object of a nerdy hero’s affection, 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 lighter fare that earned her the Academy Award for best actress, changing the genre permanently.

The Award-Winning Performance

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. Allen and Keaton dated previously before making the film, and remained close friends until her passing; during conversations, Keaton portrayed Annie as a perfect image of herself, through Allen’s eyes. It would be easy, then, to believe her portrayal meant being herself. However, her versatility in her performances, from her Godfather role and her comedic collaborations and inside Annie Hall alone, to underestimate her talent with romantic comedy as merely exuding appeal – even if she was, of course, highly charismatic.

Shifting Genres

Annie Hall notably acted as the director’s evolution between broader, joke-heavy films and a more naturalistic style. Consequently, it has plenty of gags, fantasy sequences, and a freewheeling patchwork of a romantic memory mixed with painful truths into a fated love affair. Likewise, Keaton, oversaw a change in Hollywood love stories, playing neither the screwball-era speed-talker or the glamorous airhead common in the fifties. Instead, she fuses and merges traits from both to forge a fresh approach that seems current today, halting her assertiveness with nervous pauses.

See, as an example the scene where Annie and Alvy Singer first connect after a tennis game, stumbling through reciprocal offers for a lift (despite the fact that only a single one owns a vehicle). The banter is fast, but veers erratically, with Keaton soloing around her own discomfort before winding up in a cul-de-sac of her whimsical line, a words that embody her nervous whimsy. The movie physicalizes that feeling in the next scene, as she makes blasé small talk while driving recklessly through city avenues. Later, she composes herself singing It Had to Be You in a club venue.

Complexity and Freedom

These are not instances of Annie acting erratic. Throughout the movie, there’s a complexity to her gentle eccentricity – her hippie-hangover willingness to experiment with substances, her panic over lobsters and spiders, her unwillingness to be shaped by Alvy’s efforts to mold her into someone outwardly grave (which for him means focused on dying). In the beginning, Annie might seem like an unusual choice to earn an award; she plays the female lead in a film told from a male perspective, and the protagonists’ trajectory doesn’t bend toward either changing enough to make it work. Yet Annie does change, in ways both observable and unknowable. She merely avoids becoming a better match for the male lead. Many subsequent love stories stole the superficial stuff – nervous habits, quirky fashions – failing to replicate Annie’s ultimate independence.

Enduring Impact and Mature Parts

Possibly she grew hesitant of that tendency. Post her professional partnership with Allen ended, she stepped away from romantic comedies; the film Baby Boom is really her only one from the entirety of the 1980s. But during her absence, the character Annie, the role possibly more than the free-form film, emerged as a template for the genre. Actress Meg Ryan, for example, is largely indebted for her comedic roles to Diane’s talent to portray intelligence and flightiness together. This made Keaton seem like a permanent rom-com queen even as she was actually playing matrimonial parts (whether happily, as in Father of the Bride, or not as much, as in that ensemble comedy) and/or parental figures (see The Family Stone or Because I Said So) than single gals falling in love. Even in her reunion with Allen, they’re a established married pair drawn nearer by comic amateur sleuthing – and she fits the character smoothly, wonderfully.

Yet Diane experienced an additional romantic comedy success in 2003 with that Nancy Meyers movie, as a playwright in love with a man who dates younger women (actor Jack Nicholson, naturally). The result? One more Oscar recognition, and a complete niche of romantic tales where senior actresses (typically acted by celebrities, but still!) reassert their romantic and/or social agency. A key element her passing feels so sudden is that Keaton was still making those movies just last year, a frequent big-screen star. Now fans are turning from assuming her availability to realizing what an enormous influence she was on the funny romance as it exists today. Is it tough to imagine contemporary counterparts of Meg Ryan or Goldie Hawn who emulate her path, the reason may be it’s rare for a performer of Keaton’s skill to devote herself to a style that’s often just online content for a long time.

An Exceptional Impact

Ponder: there are 10 living female actors who have been nominated multiple times. It’s rare for one of those roles to originate in a romantic comedy, not to mention multiple, as was the case for Keaton. {Because her