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Plenty of talented female actors have appeared in rom-coms. Typically, if they want to earn an Academy Award, they need to shift for dramatic parts. Diane Keaton, whose recent passing occurred, followed a reverse trajectory and pulled it off with seamless ease. Her debut significant performance was in the classic The Godfather, as dramatic an film classic as ever produced. But that same year, she reprised the part of Linda, the love interest of a geeky protagonist, in a film adaptation of Broadway’s Play It Again, Sam. She continued to alternate intense dramas with lighthearted romances across the seventies, and the lighter fare that won her an Oscar for outstanding actress, transforming the category forever.

The Award-Winning Performance

The Oscar statuette was for the film Annie Hall, written and directed by Woody Allen, with Keaton in the lead role, part of the film’s broken romance. The director and star dated previously before making the film, and remained close friends throughout her life; when speaking publicly, Keaton had characterized Annie as an idealized version of herself, from Allen’s perspective. It would be easy, then, to believe her portrayal required little effort. But there’s too much range in her acting, both between her Godfather performance and her Allen comedies and inside Annie Hall alone, to discount her skill with rom-coms as just being charming – though she was, of course, incredibly appealing.

Evolving Comedy

Annie Hall notably acted as Allen’s transition between broader, joke-heavy films and a authentic manner. Therefore, it has plenty of gags, dreamlike moments, and a loose collage of a romantic memory in between some stinging insights into a fated love affair. In a similar vein, Diane, led an evolution in American rom-coms, portraying neither the screwball-era speed-talker or the bombshell ditz common in the fifties. Rather, she blends and combines elements from each to invent a novel style that seems current today, interrupting her own boldness with uncertain moments.

Observe, for instance the scene where Annie and Alvy Singer initially hit it off after a match of tennis, awkwardly exchanging proposals for a car trip (despite the fact that only one of them has a car). The exchange is rapid, but veers erratically, with Keaton navigating her own discomfort before winding up in a cul-de-sac of that famous phrase, a expression that captures her nervous whimsy. The movie physicalizes that tone in the subsequent moment, as she has indifferent conversation while navigating wildly through city avenues. Afterward, she composes herself delivering the tune in a club venue.

Complexity and Freedom

These are not instances of the character’s unpredictability. During the entire story, there’s a complexity to her playful craziness – her lingering counterculture curiosity to sample narcotics, her anxiety about sea creatures and insects, her unwillingness to be shaped by Alvy’s efforts to mold her into someone apparently somber (for him, that implies death-obsessed). In the beginning, 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 main pair’s journey doesn’t bend toward sufficient transformation to suit each other. But Annie evolves, in aspects clear and mysterious. She just doesn’t become a more compatible mate for her co-star. Plenty of later rom-coms took the obvious elements – nervous habits, eccentric styles – without quite emulating Annie’s ultimate independence.

Ongoing Legacy and Senior Characters

Possibly she grew hesitant of that pattern. Following her collaboration with Allen ended, she paused her lighthearted roles; her movie Baby Boom is really her only one from the complete 1980s period. Yet while she was gone, the character Annie, the character perhaps moreso than the free-form film, served as a blueprint for the style. Actress Meg Ryan, for example, credits much of her love story success to Keaton’s skill to embody brains and whimsy at once. This cast Keaton as like a permanent rom-com queen despite her real roles being matrimonial parts (be it joyfully, as in that family comedy, or less so, as in that ensemble comedy) and/or parental figures (see the holiday film The Family Stone or that mother-daughter story) than independent ladies in love. Even in her reunion with Allen, they’re a established married pair drawn nearer by funny detective work – and she slips into that role easily, beautifully.

Yet Diane experienced another major rom-com hit in 2003 with the film Something’s Gotta Give, as a dramatist in love with a man who dates younger women (Jack Nicholson, naturally). The result? Her last Academy Award nod, and a whole subgenre of love stories where older women (typically acted by celebrities, but still!) take charge of their destinies. One factor her death seems like such a shock is that Keaton was still making these stories as recently as last year, a constant multiplex presence. Now fans are turning from taking that presence for granted to grasping the significant effect she was on the funny romance as it exists today. If it’s harder to think of contemporary counterparts of Meg Ryan or Goldie Hawn who emulate her path, that’s probably because it’s seldom for a star of her caliber to commit herself to a genre that’s mostly been streaming fodder for a while now.

A Special Contribution

Consider: there are a dozen performing women who earned several Oscar nods. It’s rare for one of those roles to originate in a romantic comedy, let alone half of them, as was the example of Keaton. {Because her