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Plenty of great actresses have performed in rom-coms. Typically, when aiming to receive Oscar recognition, they have to reach for dramatic parts. The late Diane Keaton, whose recent passing occurred, followed a reverse trajectory and pulled it off with disarmingly natural. Her debut significant performance was in The Godfather, as weighty an cinematic masterpiece as ever created. But that same year, she reprised the part of the character Linda, the focus of an awkward lead’s admiration, in a cinematic take of the stage play Play It Again, Sam. She continued to alternate heavy films with romantic comedies during the 1970s, and it was the latter that secured her the Oscar for best actress, changing the genre permanently.

The Academy Award Part

That Oscar was for the film Annie Hall, written and directed by Woody Allen, with Keaton portraying Annie, a component of the couple’s failed relationship. Allen and Keaton were once romantically involved before making the film, and stayed good friends for the rest of her life; in interviews, Keaton had characterized Annie as a dream iteration of herself, from Allen’s perspective. It would be easy, then, to assume Keaton’s performance meant being herself. Yet her breadth in Keaton’s work, contrasting her dramatic part and her Allen comedies and inside Annie Hall alone, to underestimate her talent with romantic comedy as merely exuding appeal – although she remained, of course, incredibly appealing.

Evolving Comedy

Annie Hall famously served as Allen’s transition between broader, joke-heavy films and a realistic approach. Consequently, it has numerous jokes, imaginative scenes, and a loose collage of a relationship memoir in between some stinging insights into a fated love affair. Likewise, Keaton, led an evolution in U.S. romantic comedies, playing neither the rapid-fire comic lead or the glamorous airhead popularized in the 1950s. Instead, she mixes and matches aspects of both to invent a novel style 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 match of tennis, awkwardly exchanging proposals for a ride (although only just one drives). The exchange is rapid, but zig-zags around unpredictably, with Keaton soloing around her own discomfort before ending up stuck of her whimsical line, a expression that captures her anxious charm. The film manifests that tone in the following sequence, as she has indifferent conversation while driving recklessly through city avenues. Afterward, she finds her footing delivering the tune in a club venue.

Depth and Autonomy

This is not evidence of Annie acting erratic. During the entire story, there’s a depth to her playful craziness – her post-hippie openness to experiment with substances, her panic over lobsters and spiders, her unwillingness to be shaped by the protagonist’s tries to turn her into someone outwardly grave (which for him means preoccupied with mortality). Initially, the character may look like an unusual choice to earn an award; she is the love interest in a story filtered through a man’s eyes, and the central couple’s arc doesn’t lead to either changing enough to make it work. Yet Annie does change, in manners visible and hidden. She simply fails to turn into a more suitable partner for the male lead. Many subsequent love stories took the obvious elements – nervous habits, eccentric styles – failing to replicate her final autonomy.

Ongoing Legacy and Senior Characters

Possibly she grew hesitant of that trend. Post her professional partnership 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. Yet while she was gone, Annie Hall, the persona even more than the free-form film, emerged as a template for the category. Meg Ryan, for example, credits much of her love story success to Keaton’s ability to play smart and flibbertigibbet simultaneously. This made Keaton seem like a permanent rom-com queen even as she was actually playing married characters (be it joyfully, as in the movie Father of the Bride, or less so, as in The First Wives Club) and/or parental figures (see that Christmas movie or the comedy 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 comic amateur sleuthing – and she fits the character easily, beautifully.

However, Keaton also enjoyed another major rom-com hit in two thousand three with Something’s Gotta Give, as a dramatist 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!) take charge of their destinies. Part of the reason her passing feels so sudden is that Keaton was still making these stories as recently as last year, a frequent big-screen star. Today viewers must shift from expecting her roles to grasping the significant effect she was on the rom-com genre as we know it. Should it be difficult to recall modern equivalents of Meg Ryan or Goldie Hawn who emulate her path, the reason may be it’s uncommon for an actor of Keaton’s skill to commit herself to a style that’s often just online content for a while now.

A Special Contribution

Ponder: there are ten active actresses who have been nominated multiple times. It’s uncommon for any performance to start in a light love story, let alone half of them, as was the situation with Diane. {Because her