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Numerous great performers have performed in love stories with humor. Typically, if they want to earn an Academy Award, they must turn for weightier characters. Diane Keaton, who passed away recently, followed a reverse trajectory and executed it with disarmingly natural. Her initial breakout part was in The Godfather, as dramatic an film classic as has ever been made. Yet in the same year, she revisited the character of Linda, the object of a nerdy hero’s affection, in a film adaptation of the theatrical production Play It Again, Sam. She persistently switched heavy films with romantic comedies throughout the ’70s, and the lighter fare that won her an Oscar for leading actress, transforming the category forever.

The Academy Award Part

The award was for Annie Hall, co-written and directed by Allen, with Keaton in the lead role, one half of the movie’s fractured love story. The director and star were once romantically involved before making the film, and stayed good friends for the rest of her life; during conversations, Keaton had characterized Annie as a dream iteration of herself, from Allen’s perspective. One could assume, then, to assume Keaton’s performance required little effort. Yet her breadth in her performances, from her Godfather role and her funny films with Allen and throughout that very movie, to discount her skill with romantic comedy as just being charming – though she was, of course, highly charismatic.

A Transition in Style

Annie Hall notably acted as Allen’s shift between more gag-based broad comedies and a authentic manner. As such, it has numerous jokes, fantasy sequences, and a loose collage of a love story recollection in between some stinging insights into a fated love affair. Keaton, similarly, oversaw a change in American rom-coms, playing neither the rapid-fire comic lead or the glamorous airhead famous from the ’50s. Instead, she mixes and matches traits from both to invent a novel style that seems current today, cutting her confidence short with nervous pauses.

Watch, for example the sequence with the couple first connect after a match of tennis, stumbling through reciprocal offers for a lift (despite the fact that only one of them has a car). The banter is fast, but meanders unexpectedly, with Keaton soloing around her own discomfort before winding up in a cul-de-sac of that famous phrase, a words that embody her nervous whimsy. The story embodies that feeling in the following sequence, as she has indifferent conversation while driving recklessly through Manhattan streets. Subsequently, she finds her footing singing It Had to Be You in a nightclub.

Complexity and Freedom

These are not instances of Annie being unstable. Across the film, there’s a dimensionality to her gentle eccentricity – her lingering counterculture curiosity to experiment with substances, her panic over lobsters and spiders, her resistance to control by Alvy’s efforts to turn her into someone more superficially serious (in his view, that signifies preoccupied with mortality). Initially, Annie could appear like an unusual choice to earn an award; she plays the female lead in a movie seen from a man’s point of view, and the protagonists’ trajectory doesn’t lead to either changing enough to make it work. But Annie evolves, in aspects clear and mysterious. She just doesn’t become a more suitable partner for Alvy. Many subsequent love stories stole the superficial stuff – anxious quirks, eccentric styles – without quite emulating her core self-reliance.

Enduring Impact and Mature Parts

Perhaps Keaton felt cautious of that tendency. Post her professional partnership with Allen concluded, she stepped away from romantic comedies; her movie Baby Boom is practically her single outing from the entirety of the 1980s. Yet while she was gone, Annie Hall, the role possibly more than the free-form film, served as a blueprint for the style. Meg Ryan, for example, is largely indebted for her comedic roles to Keaton’s ability to play smart and flibbertigibbet simultaneously. This rendered Keaton like a permanent rom-com queen despite her real roles being matrimonial parts (be it joyfully, as in the movie Father of the Bride, or more strained, as in The First Wives Club) and/or mothers (see The Family Stone or that mother-daughter story) than independent ladies in love. Even in her reunion with the director, they’re a seasoned spouses drawn nearer by funny detective work – and she fits the character easily, beautifully.

But Keaton did have an additional romantic comedy success in two thousand three with the film Something’s Gotta Give, as a writer in love with a man who dates younger women (actor Jack Nicholson, naturally). The result? Her final Oscar nomination, and a complete niche of love stories 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 Keaton was still making such films up until recently, a regular cinema fixture. Now fans are turning from assuming her availability to realizing what an enormous influence she was on the funny romance as it is recognized. Is it tough to imagine contemporary counterparts of those earlier stars who walk in her shoes, that’s probably because it’s seldom for a star of Keaton’s skill to devote herself to a category that’s frequently reduced to digital fare for a while now.

A Unique Legacy

Consider: there are 10 living female actors who earned several Oscar nods. It’s unusual for a single part to begin in a rom-com, especially not several, as was the example of Keaton. {Because her