Starting with Annie Hall to Something’s Gotta Give: the actress Diane Keaton Was the Archetypal Queen of Comedy.
Numerous great performers have performed in romantic comedies. Typically, when aiming to earn an Academy Award, they have to reach for dramatic parts. Diane Keaton, who died unexpectedly, charted a different course and executed it with seamless ease. Her first major film role was in The Godfather, as weighty an American masterpiece as ever produced. However, concurrently, she revisited the character of the character Linda, the focus of an awkward lead’s admiration, in a film adaptation of Broadway’s Play It Again, Sam. She continued to alternate serious dramas with funny love stories across the seventies, and the comedies that won her an Oscar for best actress, transforming the category forever.
The Award-Winning Performance
The award was for Annie Hall, written and directed by Woody Allen, with Keaton as the title character, a component of the couple’s failed relationship. Woody and Diane dated previously before making the film, and remained close friends for the rest of her life; in interviews, Keaton portrayed Annie as a perfect image of herself, as seen by Allen. One could assume, then, to think her acting involves doing what came naturally. However, her versatility in her performances, contrasting her dramatic part and her comedic collaborations and throughout that very movie, to dismiss her facility with rom-coms as simply turning on the charm – although she remained, of course, incredibly appealing.
Shifting Genres
Annie Hall famously served as the director’s evolution between broader, joke-heavy films and a more naturalistic style. Therefore, it has numerous jokes, fantasy sequences, and a improvised tapestry of a relationship memoir mixed with painful truths into a doomed romantic relationship. Keaton, similarly, led an evolution in Hollywood love stories, embodying neither the screwball-era speed-talker or the glamorous airhead popularized in the 1950s. Rather, she fuses and merges traits from both to forge a fresh approach that feels modern even now, halting her assertiveness with nervous pauses.
See, as an example the scene where Annie and Alvy Singer initially bond after a game on the courts, fumbling over ping-ponging invitations for a ride (despite the fact that only one of them has a car). The banter is fast, but veers erratically, with Keaton soloing around her nervousness before winding up in a cul-de-sac of “la di da”, a expression that captures her anxious charm. The movie physicalizes that feeling in the following sequence, as she makes blasé small talk while operating the car carelessly through Manhattan streets. Subsequently, she centers herself delivering the tune in a club venue.
Dimensionality and Independence
These are not instances of the character’s unpredictability. Across the film, there’s a complexity to her gentle eccentricity – her post-hippie openness to try drugs, her panic over lobsters and spiders, her refusal to be manipulated by the protagonist’s tries to shape her into someone outwardly grave (which for him means preoccupied with mortality). In the beginning, Annie might seem like an odd character to earn an award; she’s the romantic lead in a film told from a male perspective, and the main pair’s journey fails to result in sufficient transformation to suit each other. Yet Annie does change, in manners visible and hidden. She simply fails to turn into a more suitable partner for her co-star. Many subsequent love stories took the obvious elements – anxious quirks, odd clothing – without quite emulating Annie’s ultimate independence.
Enduring Impact and Mature Parts
Maybe Keaton was wary of that trend. After her working relationship with Allen ended, she took a break from rom-coms; her movie Baby Boom is practically her single outing from the whole decade of the eighties. But during her absence, Annie Hall, the persona even more than the unconventional story, became a model for the genre. Actress Meg Ryan, for example, is largely indebted for her comedic roles to Keaton’s ability to portray intelligence and flightiness together. This cast Keaton as like a permanent rom-com queen while she was in fact portraying more wives (be it joyfully, as in Father of the Bride, or more strained, as in that ensemble comedy) and/or parental figures (see that Christmas movie or that mother-daughter story) than single gals falling in love. Even in her reunion with Woody Allen, they’re a seasoned spouses drawn nearer by humorous investigations – and she eases into the part effortlessly, gracefully.
Yet Diane experienced another major rom-com hit in 2003 with that Nancy Meyers movie, as a dramatist in love with a older playboy (Jack Nicholson, naturally). What happened? Her final Oscar nomination, and a complete niche of romances where older women (typically acted by celebrities, but still!) reassert their romantic and/or social agency. One factor her passing feels so sudden is that Diane continued creating such films as recently as last year, a regular cinema fixture. Now fans are turning from taking that presence for granted to understanding the huge impact she was on the funny romance as we know it. If it’s harder to think of modern equivalents of those earlier stars who similarly follow in Keaton’s footsteps, that’s probably because it’s seldom for a star of Keaton’s skill to commit herself to a category that’s frequently reduced to digital fare for a recent period.
A Special Contribution
Ponder: there are a dozen performing women who received at least four best actress nominations. It’s rare for one of those roles to originate in a romantic comedy, let alone half of them, as was the situation with Diane. {Because her