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Plenty of talented performers have starred in rom-coms. Usually, should they desire to receive Oscar recognition, they must turn for more serious roles. The late Diane Keaton, who died unexpectedly, charted a different course and executed it with disarmingly natural. Her initial breakout part was in The Godfather, as weighty an film classic as has ever been made. But that same year, she reprised the part of the character Linda, the focus of an awkward lead’s admiration, in a movie version of the stage play Play It Again, Sam. She regularly juggled intense dramas with lighthearted romances throughout the ’70s, and it was the latter that won her an Oscar for best actress, changing the genre permanently.

The Oscar-Winning Role

That Oscar was for the film Annie Hall, helmed and co-scripted by Woody Allen, with Keaton as the title character, part of the film’s broken romance. Woody and Diane were once romantically involved prior to filming, and continued as pals throughout her life; during conversations, Keaton described Annie as an idealized version of herself, from Allen’s perspective. It would be easy, then, to believe her portrayal involves doing what came naturally. But there’s too much range in Keaton’s work, contrasting her dramatic part and her comedic collaborations and within Annie Hall itself, to discount her skill with romantic comedy as just being charming – even if she was, of course, tremendously charming.

Evolving Comedy

Annie Hall famously served as Allen’s shift between broader, joke-heavy films and a authentic manner. Consequently, it has lots of humor, fantasy sequences, and a improvised tapestry of a relationship memoir alongside sharp observations into a ill-fated romance. Likewise, Keaton, presides over a transition in American rom-coms, portraying neither the screwball-era speed-talker or the bombshell ditz popularized in the 1950s. Rather, she fuses and merges elements from each to forge a fresh approach that still reads as oddly contemporary, interrupting her own boldness with her own false-start hesitations.

Observe, for instance the moment when Annie and Alvy first connect after a match of tennis, stumbling through reciprocal offers for a lift (even though only just one drives). The dialogue is quick, but meanders unexpectedly, with Keaton soloing around her unease before winding up in a cul-de-sac of “la di da”, a expression that captures her nervous whimsy. The movie physicalizes that tone in the next scene, as she engages in casual chat while driving recklessly through New York roads. Afterward, she finds her footing performing the song in a cabaret.

Depth and Autonomy

This is not evidence of the character’s unpredictability. Across the film, there’s a dimensionality to her light zaniness – her lingering counterculture curiosity to try drugs, her fear of crustaceans and arachnids, her refusal to be manipulated by the protagonist’s tries to shape her into someone outwardly grave (in his view, that signifies focused on dying). Initially, Annie could appear like an strange pick to win an Oscar; she is the love interest 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. However, she transforms, in aspects clear and mysterious. She just doesn’t become a better match for Alvy. Plenty of later rom-coms took the obvious elements – neurotic hang-ups, odd clothing – not fully copying her final autonomy.

Ongoing Legacy and Senior Characters

Maybe Keaton was wary of that pattern. After her working relationship with Allen ended, she stepped away from romantic comedies; Baby Boom is essentially her sole entry from the complete 1980s period. Yet while she was gone, the character Annie, the persona even more than the loosely structured movie, served as a blueprint for the category. Meg Ryan, for example, credits much of her love story success to Diane’s talent to portray intelligence and flightiness together. This made Keaton seem like a everlasting comedy royalty while she was in fact portraying matrimonial parts (whether happily, as in that family comedy, or not as much, as in The First Wives Club) and/or parental figures (see The Family Stone or Because I Said So) than independent ladies in love. Even in her reunion with the director, they’re a seasoned spouses brought closer together by comic amateur sleuthing – and she eases into the part effortlessly, gracefully.

Yet Diane experienced an additional romantic comedy success in two thousand three with the film Something’s Gotta Give, as a dramatist in love with a younger-dating cad (the star Jack Nicholson, naturally). The result? Her last Academy Award nod, and a complete niche of romances where senior actresses (typically acted by celebrities, but still!) reclaim their love lives. One factor her passing feels so sudden is that Diane continued creating such films just last year, a constant multiplex presence. Today viewers must shift from taking that presence for granted to grasping the significant effect 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 similarly follow in Keaton’s footsteps, that’s likely since it’s rare for a performer of Keaton’s skill to commit herself to a category that’s often just online content for a while now.

A Unique Legacy

Ponder: there are 10 living female actors who earned several Oscar nods. It’s uncommon for any performance to originate in a romantic comedy, let alone half of them, as was the case for Keaton. {Because her