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Many talented actresses have appeared in romantic comedies. Ordinarily, should they desire to receive Oscar recognition, they have to reach for more serious roles. The late Diane Keaton, whose recent passing occurred, followed a reverse trajectory and executed it with effortless grace. Her first major film role was in the classic The Godfather, as weighty an film classic as has ever been made. But that same year, she reprised the part of Linda, the focus of an awkward lead’s admiration, in a cinematic take of Broadway’s Play It Again, Sam. She persistently switched serious dramas with lighthearted romances during the 1970s, and it was the latter that secured her the Oscar for leading actress, altering the genre for good.

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. The director and star were once romantically involved before production, and stayed good friends until her passing; in interviews, Keaton had characterized Annie as a perfect image of herself, from Allen’s perspective. It might be simple, then, to think her acting involves doing what came naturally. But there’s too much range in her performances, from her Godfather role and her Allen comedies and throughout that very movie, to underestimate her talent with funny romances as simply turning on the charm – although she remained, of course, tremendously charming.

A Transition in Style

The film famously functioned as Allen’s shift between slapstick-oriented movies and a more naturalistic style. As such, it has lots of humor, fantasy sequences, and a freewheeling patchwork of a love story recollection 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 rapid-fire comic lead or the sexy scatterbrain famous from the ’50s. Rather, she blends and combines traits from both to create something entirely new that feels modern even now, halting her assertiveness with uncertain moments.

Watch, for example the moment when Annie and Alvy initially bond after a match of tennis, stumbling through reciprocal offers for a lift (even though only one of them has a car). The banter is fast, but meanders unexpectedly, with Keaton navigating her own discomfort before winding up in a cul-de-sac of that famous phrase, a expression that captures her quirky unease. The story embodies that sensibility in the next scene, as she has indifferent conversation while operating the car carelessly through city avenues. Subsequently, she composes herself singing It Had to Be You in a cabaret.

Depth and Autonomy

These are not instances of Annie acting erratic. During the entire story, there’s a dimensionality to her gentle eccentricity – her lingering counterculture curiosity to experiment with substances, her anxiety about sea creatures and insects, her refusal to be manipulated by Alvy’s efforts to shape her into someone more superficially serious (for him, that implies death-obsessed). At first, Annie might seem like an unusual choice to receive acclaim; she is the love interest in a story filtered through a man’s eyes, and the protagonists’ trajectory fails to result in sufficient transformation accommodate the other. Yet Annie does change, in aspects clear and mysterious. She simply fails to turn into a more compatible mate for the male lead. Plenty of later rom-coms stole the superficial stuff – nervous habits, quirky fashions – without quite emulating her final autonomy.

Ongoing Legacy and Senior Characters

Perhaps Keaton felt cautious of that pattern. Post her professional partnership with Allen concluded, she stepped away from romantic comedies; her movie Baby Boom is really her only one from the complete 1980s period. However, in her hiatus, Annie Hall, the character perhaps moreso than the free-form film, emerged as a template for the style. Star Meg Ryan, for example, owes most of her rom-com career to Diane’s talent to play smart and flibbertigibbet simultaneously. This rendered Keaton like a permanent rom-com queen while she was in fact portraying matrimonial parts (whether happily, as in the movie Father of the Bride, or less so, as in that ensemble comedy) and/or parental figures (see The Family Stone or that mother-daughter story) than single gals falling in love. Even in her comeback with Allen, they’re a seasoned spouses drawn nearer by funny detective work – and she slips into that role smoothly, wonderfully.

However, Keaton also enjoyed a further love story triumph in the year 2003 with the film Something’s Gotta Give, as a writer in love with a older playboy (the star Jack Nicholson, naturally). The outcome? Her final Oscar nomination, and a complete niche of romantic tales where older women (usually played by movie stars, but still!) take charge of their destinies. One factor her death seems like such a shock is that Keaton was still making such films as recently as last year, a frequent big-screen star. Today viewers must shift from taking that presence for granted to grasping the significant effect she was on the romantic comedy as it is recognized. Is it tough to imagine contemporary counterparts of those earlier stars who emulate her path, that’s probably because it’s rare for a performer of her talent to commit herself to a category that’s often just online content for a recent period.

A Unique Legacy

Reflect: there are ten active actresses who earned several Oscar nods. It’s rare for one of those roles to begin in a rom-com, not to mention multiple, as was the example of Keaton. {Because her