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Many great performers have starred in love stories with humor. Typically, when aiming to earn an Academy Award, they must turn for dramatic parts. Diane Keaton, who died unexpectedly, followed a reverse trajectory and pulled it off with disarmingly natural. Her first major film role was in The Godfather, about as serious an film classic as ever created. Yet in the same year, she reprised the part of the character Linda, the object of a nerdy hero’s affection, in a cinematic take of Broadway’s Play It Again, Sam. She persistently switched heavy films with lighthearted romances during the 1970s, and the lighter fare that secured her the Oscar for leading actress, changing the genre permanently.

The Award-Winning Performance

The award was for Annie Hall, co-written and directed by Allen, with Keaton as the title character, one half of the movie’s fractured love story. The director and star dated previously before production, and remained close friends throughout her life; in interviews, Keaton portrayed Annie as a perfect image of herself, as seen by Allen. It would be easy, then, to think her acting required little effort. Yet her breadth in her performances, from her Godfather role and her comedic collaborations and inside Annie Hall alone, to dismiss her facility with romantic comedy as just being charming – even if she was, of course, incredibly appealing.

Shifting Genres

Annie Hall famously served as the director’s evolution between broader, joke-heavy films and a authentic manner. As such, it has lots of humor, fantasy sequences, and a loose collage of a love story recollection alongside sharp observations into a ill-fated romance. Keaton, similarly, presides over a transition in U.S. romantic comedies, embodying neither the screwball-era speed-talker or the glamorous airhead famous from the ’50s. On the contrary, she fuses and merges traits from both to create something entirely new that still reads as oddly contemporary, cutting her confidence short with nervous pauses.

Watch, for example the sequence with the couple initially hit it off after a tennis game, stumbling through reciprocal offers for a ride (despite the fact that only just one drives). The exchange is rapid, but veers erratically, with Keaton navigating her unease before ending up stuck of that famous phrase, a expression that captures her quirky unease. The story embodies that feeling in the subsequent moment, as she makes blasé small talk while driving recklessly through city avenues. Later, she finds her footing singing It Had to Be You in a cabaret.

Depth and Autonomy

These aren’t examples of the character’s unpredictability. Across the film, there’s a dimensionality to her gentle eccentricity – her post-hippie openness to experiment with substances, her anxiety about sea creatures and insects, her unwillingness to be shaped by Alvy’s attempts to mold her into someone outwardly grave (which for him means focused on dying). In the beginning, the character may look like an strange pick to win an Oscar; she’s the romantic lead in a story filtered through a man’s eyes, and the protagonists’ trajectory fails to result in adequate growth to make it work. However, she transforms, in manners visible and hidden. She just doesn’t become a more suitable partner for her co-star. Many subsequent love stories borrowed the surface traits – neurotic hang-ups, odd clothing – without quite emulating her core self-reliance.

Lasting Influence and Later Roles

Perhaps Keaton felt cautious of that trend. Post her professional partnership with Allen ended, she stepped away from romantic comedies; Baby Boom is really her only one from the whole decade of the eighties. However, in her hiatus, the character Annie, the character perhaps moreso than the loosely structured movie, emerged as a template for the style. Star Meg Ryan, for example, is largely indebted for her comedic roles to Keaton’s skill to play smart and flibbertigibbet simultaneously. This made Keaton seem like a everlasting comedy royalty even as she was actually playing married characters (if contentedly, as in the movie Father of the Bride, or less so, as in The First Wives Club) and/or mothers (see the holiday film The Family Stone or that mother-daughter story) than independent ladies in love. Even in her reunion with Woody Allen, they’re a seasoned spouses drawn nearer by comic amateur sleuthing – and she fits the character easily, beautifully.

But Keaton did have another major rom-com hit in two thousand three with the film Something’s Gotta Give, as a dramatist in love with a man who dates younger women (Jack Nicholson, naturally). The outcome? One more Oscar recognition, and a whole subgenre of romances where mature females (often portrayed by famous faces, but still!) take charge of their destinies. One factor her loss is so startling is that Keaton was still making those movies just last year, a constant multiplex presence. Now fans are turning from expecting her roles to grasping the significant effect she was on the romantic comedy as it is recognized. If it’s harder to think of modern equivalents of such actresses who emulate her path, the reason may be it’s rare for a performer of her talent to devote herself to a style that’s frequently reduced to digital fare for a long time.

A Unique Legacy

Ponder: there are a dozen performing women who earned several Oscar nods. It’s uncommon for any performance to originate in a romantic comedy, not to mention multiple, as was the situation with Diane. {Because her