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Numerous accomplished actresses have starred in romantic comedies. Usually, should they desire to win an Oscar, they must turn for dramatic parts. The late Diane Keaton, whose recent passing occurred, took an opposite path and executed it with disarmingly natural. Her debut significant performance was in The Godfather, as weighty an cinematic masterpiece as ever created. However, concurrently, she returned to the role of 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 heavy films with lighthearted romances during the 1970s, and it was the latter that earned her the Academy Award for leading actress, changing the genre permanently.

The Oscar-Winning Role

The Oscar statuette was for the film Annie Hall, helmed and co-scripted by Woody Allen, with Keaton portraying Annie, part of the film’s broken romance. Allen and Keaton dated previously before production, and remained close friends until her passing; during conversations, Keaton had characterized Annie as a perfect image of herself, through Allen’s eyes. It might be simple, then, to think her acting involves doing what came naturally. But there’s too much range in her acting, contrasting her dramatic part and her Allen comedies and inside Annie Hall alone, to dismiss her facility with funny romances as just being charming – although she remained, of course, tremendously charming.

Evolving Comedy

Annie Hall famously served as Allen’s shift between slapstick-oriented movies and a authentic manner. Consequently, it has plenty of gags, dreamlike moments, and a freewheeling patchwork of a love story recollection in between some stinging insights into a ill-fated romance. Keaton, similarly, oversaw a change in American rom-coms, playing neither the screwball-era speed-talker or the glamorous airhead common in the fifties. Instead, she blends and combines aspects of both to forge a fresh approach that seems current today, halting her assertiveness with her own false-start hesitations.

Watch, for example the scene where Annie and Alvy Singer first connect after a match of tennis, fumbling over ping-ponging invitations for a ride (even though only one of them has a car). The exchange is rapid, but zig-zags around unpredictably, with Keaton navigating her own discomfort before ending up stuck of her whimsical line, a words that embody her quirky unease. The movie physicalizes that tone in the next scene, as she makes blasé small talk while operating the car carelessly through Manhattan streets. Subsequently, she finds her footing singing It Had to Be You in a cabaret.

Complexity and Freedom

These are not instances of the character’s unpredictability. Across the film, there’s a complexity to her gentle eccentricity – her lingering counterculture curiosity to sample narcotics, her panic over lobsters and spiders, her refusal to be manipulated by Alvy’s efforts to mold her into someone more superficially serious (in his view, that signifies death-obsessed). At first, the character may look like an unusual choice to earn an award; she plays the female lead in a story filtered through a man’s eyes, and the central couple’s arc doesn’t bend toward sufficient transformation to suit each other. But Annie evolves, in manners visible and hidden. She merely avoids becoming a more compatible mate for her co-star. Many subsequent love stories borrowed the surface traits – anxious quirks, quirky fashions – not fully copying Annie’s ultimate independence.

Ongoing Legacy and Senior Characters

Maybe Keaton was wary of that tendency. Post her professional partnership with Allen ended, she took a break from rom-coms; the film Baby Boom is essentially her sole entry from the complete 1980s period. However, in her hiatus, the character Annie, the character perhaps moreso than the free-form film, became a model for the style. Meg Ryan, for example, credits much of her love story success to Keaton’s ability to play smart and flibbertigibbet simultaneously. This cast Keaton as like a permanent rom-com queen while she was in fact portraying matrimonial parts (be it joyfully, as in Father of the Bride, or not as much, as in that ensemble comedy) and/or mothers (see the holiday film The Family Stone or the comedy Because I Said So) than independent ladies in love. Even in her reunion with Allen, they’re a established married pair brought closer together by humorous investigations – and she slips into that role effortlessly, gracefully.

Yet Diane experienced a further love story triumph in 2003 with Something’s Gotta Give, as a playwright in love with a man who dates younger women (Jack Nicholson, naturally). The result? One more Oscar recognition, and a whole subgenre of love stories where older women (typically acted by celebrities, but still!) reclaim their love lives. A key element her loss is so startling is that she kept producing those movies up until recently, a regular cinema fixture. Today viewers must shift from expecting her roles to understanding the huge impact she was on the rom-com genre as it exists today. Should it be difficult to recall contemporary counterparts of Meg Ryan or Goldie Hawn who walk in her shoes, that’s probably because it’s seldom for a star of her talent to dedicate herself to a genre that’s frequently reduced to digital fare for a long time.

An Exceptional Impact

Ponder: there are ten active actresses who received at least four best actress nominations. It’s uncommon for any performance to begin in a rom-com, not to mention multiple, as was the case for Keaton. {Because her