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Plenty of accomplished female actors have appeared in romantic comedies. Typically, should they desire to win an Oscar, they must turn for dramatic parts. The late Diane Keaton, who passed away recently, took an opposite path and executed it with disarmingly natural. Her debut significant performance was in the classic The Godfather, as dramatic an American masterpiece as ever created. 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 stage play Play It Again, Sam. She regularly juggled intense dramas with lighthearted romances across the seventies, and the lighter fare that secured her the Oscar for leading actress, transforming the category forever.

The Oscar-Winning Role

The Oscar statuette was for Annie Hall, written and directed by Woody Allen, with Keaton portraying Annie, a component of the couple’s failed relationship. Allen and Keaton dated previously before production, and stayed good friends until her passing; in interviews, Keaton had characterized Annie as a dream iteration of herself, from Allen’s perspective. It would be easy, then, to believe her portrayal meant being herself. But there’s too much range in Keaton’s work, contrasting her dramatic part and her comedic collaborations and within Annie Hall itself, to underestimate her talent with rom-coms as simply turning on the charm – though she was, of course, tremendously charming.

A Transition in Style

Annie Hall famously served as Allen’s transition between more gag-based broad comedies and a authentic manner. As such, it has plenty of gags, imaginative scenes, and a freewheeling patchwork of a relationship memoir mixed with painful truths into a ill-fated romance. In a similar vein, Diane, presides over a transition in American rom-coms, embodying neither the screwball-era speed-talker or the bombshell ditz common in the fifties. On the contrary, she mixes and matches traits from both to forge a fresh approach that seems current today, interrupting her own boldness with her own false-start hesitations.

Observe, for instance the moment when Annie and Alvy first connect after a tennis game, fumbling over ping-ponging invitations for a car trip (despite the fact that only just one drives). The banter is fast, but veers erratically, with Keaton maneuvering through her nervousness before ending up stuck of that famous phrase, a phrase that encapsulates her anxious charm. The film manifests that feeling in the next scene, as she makes blasé small talk while driving recklessly through New York roads. Subsequently, she composes herself delivering the tune in a cabaret.

Depth and Autonomy

These are not instances of Annie acting erratic. Throughout the movie, there’s a complexity to her light zaniness – her post-hippie openness to experiment with substances, her fear of crustaceans and arachnids, her unwillingness to be shaped by Alvy’s efforts to turn her into someone outwardly grave (in his view, that signifies death-obsessed). At first, Annie could appear like an strange pick to receive acclaim; she plays the female lead in a movie seen from a man’s point of view, and the main pair’s journey doesn’t bend toward adequate growth accommodate the other. But Annie evolves, in manners visible and hidden. She simply fails to turn into a more compatible mate for her co-star. Many subsequent love stories borrowed the surface traits – anxious quirks, odd clothing – failing to replicate her final autonomy.

Enduring Impact and Mature Parts

Perhaps Keaton felt cautious of that tendency. Following her collaboration with Allen concluded, she paused her lighthearted roles; Baby Boom is really her only one from the complete 1980s period. But during her absence, the character Annie, the role possibly more than the free-form film, served as a blueprint for the style. Actress Meg Ryan, for example, credits much of her love story success to Keaton’s skill to embody brains and whimsy at once. This rendered Keaton like a everlasting comedy royalty despite her real roles being matrimonial parts (if contentedly, as in the movie Father of the Bride, or more strained, as in the film The First Wives Club) and/or mothers (see that Christmas movie or the comedy Because I Said So) than independent ladies in love. Even in her comeback with the director, they’re a long-married couple brought closer together by comic amateur sleuthing – and she fits the character effortlessly, gracefully.

However, Keaton also enjoyed a further love story triumph in two thousand three with Something’s Gotta Give, as a writer in love with a man who dates younger women (Jack Nicholson, naturally). The outcome? Her last Academy Award nod, and a whole subgenre of romantic tales where older women (usually played by movie stars, but still!) reclaim their love lives. A key element her loss is so startling is that Keaton was still making these stories up until recently, a regular cinema fixture. Today viewers must shift from taking that presence for granted to understanding the huge impact she was on the rom-com genre as we know it. Should it be difficult to recall contemporary counterparts of such actresses who similarly follow in Keaton’s footsteps, that’s probably because it’s seldom for a star of her talent to devote herself to a category that’s frequently reduced to digital fare for a long time.

A Special Contribution

Ponder: there are a dozen performing women who earned several Oscar nods. It’s rare for one of those roles to originate in a romantic comedy, especially not several, as was the situation with Diane. {Because her