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Many great actresses have performed in romantic comedies. Usually, 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 made it look disarmingly natural. Her first major film role was in the classic The Godfather, as weighty an film classic as ever produced. Yet in the same year, she returned to the role of the character Linda, the focus of an awkward lead’s admiration, in a film adaptation of the theatrical production Play It Again, Sam. She persistently switched heavy films with funny love stories throughout the ’70s, and the comedies that won her an Oscar for leading actress, changing the genre permanently.

The Award-Winning Performance

That Oscar was for Annie Hall, helmed and co-scripted by Woody Allen, with Keaton as the title character, one half of the movie’s fractured love story. Woody and Diane had been in a romantic relationship before making the film, and continued as pals throughout her life; during conversations, Keaton portrayed Annie as a dream iteration of herself, as seen by Allen. It might be simple, then, to believe her portrayal involves doing what came naturally. However, her versatility in her acting, contrasting her dramatic part and her Allen comedies and inside Annie Hall alone, to underestimate her talent with rom-coms as just being charming – though she was, of course, incredibly appealing.

Evolving Comedy

The film famously functioned as Allen’s transition between broader, joke-heavy films and a authentic manner. As such, it has plenty of gags, imaginative scenes, and a improvised tapestry of a love story recollection mixed with painful truths into a ill-fated romance. In a similar vein, Diane, presides over a transition in U.S. romantic comedies, playing neither the rapid-fire comic lead or the bombshell ditz popularized in the 1950s. On the contrary, she blends and combines aspects of both to forge a fresh approach that still reads as oddly contemporary, halting her assertiveness with nervous pauses.

Watch, for example the sequence with the couple initially hit it off after a game on the courts, fumbling over ping-ponging invitations for a car trip (despite the fact that only one of them has a car). The dialogue is quick, but veers erratically, with Keaton soloing around her own discomfort before ending up stuck of “la di da”, a words that embody her nervous whimsy. The movie physicalizes that tone in the subsequent moment, as she has indifferent conversation while operating the car carelessly through city avenues. Afterward, she composes herself delivering the tune in a cabaret.

Dimensionality and Independence

This is not evidence of Annie being unstable. Across the film, there’s a dimensionality to her playful craziness – her hippie-hangover willingness to experiment with substances, her anxiety about sea creatures and insects, her resistance to control by the protagonist’s tries to turn her into someone more superficially serious (which for him means preoccupied with mortality). At first, Annie might seem like an unusual choice to receive acclaim; she’s the romantic lead in a film told from a male perspective, and the main pair’s journey doesn’t bend toward either changing enough accommodate the other. However, she transforms, in ways both observable and unknowable. She merely avoids becoming a more compatible mate for the male lead. Plenty of later rom-coms borrowed the surface traits – neurotic hang-ups, eccentric styles – failing to replicate Annie’s ultimate independence.

Lasting Influence and Later Roles

Possibly she grew hesitant of that tendency. After her working relationship with Allen ended, she stepped away from romantic comedies; the film Baby Boom is practically her single outing from the entirety of the 1980s. However, in her hiatus, the film Annie Hall, the character perhaps moreso than the unconventional story, served as a blueprint for the style. Actress Meg Ryan, for example, is largely indebted for her comedic roles to Keaton’s ability to portray intelligence and flightiness together. This rendered Keaton like a permanent rom-com queen even as she was actually playing matrimonial parts (if contentedly, as in Father of the Bride, or more strained, as in The First Wives Club) and/or parental figures (see the holiday film The Family Stone or the comedy Because I Said So) than unattached women finding romance. Even in her reunion with the director, they’re a established married pair drawn nearer by comic amateur sleuthing – and she fits the character easily, beautifully.

Yet Diane experienced an additional romantic comedy success in two thousand three with the film Something’s Gotta Give, as a writer in love with a younger-dating cad (the star Jack Nicholson, naturally). What happened? Her last Academy Award nod, and a whole subgenre of love stories where mature females (often portrayed by famous faces, but still!) reassert their romantic and/or social agency. A key element her passing feels so sudden is that Diane continued creating those movies just last year, a frequent big-screen star. Today viewers must shift from assuming her availability to understanding the huge impact she was on the rom-com genre as it is recognized. Is it tough to imagine contemporary counterparts of those earlier stars who walk in her shoes, that’s likely since it’s seldom for a star of her talent to commit herself to a style that’s mostly been streaming fodder for a while now.

A Special Contribution

Ponder: there are 10 living female actors who earned several Oscar nods. It’s uncommon for any performance to originate in a romantic comedy, not to mention multiple, as was the situation with Diane. {Because her