Starting with the film Annie Hall all the way to the movie Something’s Gotta Give: Diane Keaton Was the Quintessential Queen of Comedy.

Numerous accomplished female actors have appeared in love stories with humor. Usually, should they desire to receive Oscar recognition, they need to shift for weightier characters. Diane Keaton, who died unexpectedly, followed a reverse trajectory and pulled it off with disarmingly natural. Her first major film role was in The Godfather, as weighty an film classic as ever produced. However, concurrently, she revisited the character of the character Linda, the object of a nerdy hero’s affection, in a cinematic take of the stage play Play It Again, Sam. She continued to alternate intense dramas with lighthearted romances during the 1970s, and it was the latter that secured her the Oscar for outstanding actress, transforming the category forever.

The Oscar-Winning Role

That Oscar was for Annie Hall, written and directed by Woody Allen, with Keaton as the title character, one half of the movie’s fractured love story. The director and star had been in a romantic relationship before production, and remained close friends throughout her life; during conversations, Keaton had characterized Annie as a perfect image of herself, through Allen’s eyes. It might be simple, then, to believe her portrayal involves doing what came naturally. However, her versatility in her performances, both between her Godfather performance and her Allen comedies and throughout that very movie, to dismiss her facility with rom-coms as simply turning on the charm – though she was, of course, highly charismatic.

A Transition in Style

Annie Hall notably acted as the director’s evolution between slapstick-oriented movies and a more naturalistic style. Consequently, it has numerous jokes, dreamlike moments, and a improvised tapestry of a love story recollection mixed with painful truths into a doomed romantic relationship. In a similar vein, Diane, presides over a transition in American rom-coms, portraying neither the screwball-era speed-talker or the sexy scatterbrain common in the fifties. Rather, she blends and combines traits from both to invent a novel style that feels modern even now, interrupting her own boldness with nervous pauses.

Observe, for instance the moment when Annie and Alvy first connect after a match of tennis, awkwardly exchanging proposals for a lift (despite the fact that only a single one owns a vehicle). The dialogue is quick, but meanders unexpectedly, with Keaton maneuvering through her nervousness before ending up stuck of her whimsical line, a expression that captures her anxious charm. The movie physicalizes that feeling in the next scene, as she makes blasé small talk while navigating wildly through Manhattan streets. Subsequently, she composes herself delivering the tune in a nightclub.

Dimensionality and Independence

These aren’t examples of Annie being unstable. During the entire story, there’s a dimensionality to her playful craziness – her hippie-hangover willingness to experiment with substances, her anxiety about sea creatures and insects, her refusal to be manipulated by the protagonist’s tries to mold her into someone outwardly grave (for him, that implies preoccupied with mortality). Initially, Annie could appear like an strange pick to win an Oscar; she plays the female lead in a story filtered through a man’s eyes, and the central couple’s arc doesn’t bend toward either changing enough accommodate the other. However, she transforms, in aspects clear and mysterious. She simply fails to turn into a more compatible mate for her co-star. Plenty of later rom-coms took the obvious elements – neurotic hang-ups, odd clothing – failing to replicate her core self-reliance.

Lasting Influence and Later Roles

Maybe Keaton was wary of that trend. Following her collaboration with Allen concluded, she stepped away from romantic comedies; Baby Boom is really her only one from the complete 1980s period. Yet while she was gone, Annie Hall, the role possibly more than the loosely structured movie, became a model for the style. Actress Meg Ryan, for example, is largely indebted for her comedic roles to Keaton’s ability to play smart and flibbertigibbet simultaneously. This cast Keaton as like a permanent rom-com queen despite her real roles being more wives (if contentedly, as in the movie Father of the Bride, or less so, as in the film The First Wives Club) and/or parental figures (see The Family Stone or Because I Said So) than single gals falling in love. Even in her reunion with Woody Allen, they’re a seasoned spouses united more deeply by funny detective work – 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 romances where mature females (typically acted by celebrities, but still!) take charge of their destinies. A key element her death seems like such a shock is that Keaton was still making these stories as recently as last year, a regular cinema fixture. Today viewers must shift from expecting her roles to realizing what an enormous influence she was on the romantic comedy as it is recognized. Is it tough to imagine contemporary counterparts of those earlier stars who walk in her shoes, that’s probably because it’s uncommon for an actor of her caliber to commit herself to a genre that’s frequently reduced to digital fare for a while now.

A Special Contribution

Reflect: there are 10 living female actors who earned several Oscar nods. It’s unusual for a single part to begin in a rom-com, not to mention multiple, as was the case for Keaton. {Because her