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Numerous talented female actors have starred in rom-coms. Usually, should they desire to receive Oscar recognition, they must turn for weightier characters. The late Diane Keaton, who passed away recently, took an opposite path and executed it with effortless grace. Her initial breakout part was in The Godfather, as dramatic an film classic as ever created. Yet in the same year, she revisited the character of Linda, the focus of an awkward lead’s admiration, in a movie version of Broadway’s Play It Again, Sam. She continued to alternate intense dramas with funny love stories throughout the ’70s, and it was the latter that secured her the Oscar for outstanding actress, altering the genre for good.

The Academy Award Part

The Oscar statuette was for the film Annie Hall, helmed and co-scripted by Woody Allen, with Keaton as the title character, a component of the couple’s failed relationship. The director and star had been in a romantic relationship before making the film, and remained close friends for the rest of her life; in interviews, Keaton portrayed Annie as an idealized version of herself, from Allen’s perspective. It would be easy, then, to assume Keaton’s performance meant being herself. Yet her breadth in her performances, contrasting her dramatic part and her Allen comedies and inside Annie Hall alone, to dismiss her facility 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 numerous jokes, dreamlike moments, and a improvised tapestry of a relationship memoir alongside sharp observations into a doomed romantic relationship. Keaton, similarly, presides over a transition in U.S. romantic comedies, embodying neither the fast-talking screwball type or the glamorous airhead famous from the ’50s. On the contrary, she mixes and matches aspects of both to invent a novel style that feels modern even now, interrupting her own boldness with nervous pauses.

Observe, for instance the scene where Annie and Alvy Singer initially hit it off after a match of tennis, awkwardly exchanging proposals for a ride (despite the fact that only just one drives). The banter is fast, but veers erratically, with Keaton maneuvering through her nervousness before winding up in a cul-de-sac of her whimsical line, a expression that captures her quirky unease. The film manifests that feeling in the following sequence, as she makes blasé small talk while driving recklessly through city avenues. Later, she composes herself performing the song in a club venue.

Depth and Autonomy

These aren’t examples of the character’s unpredictability. Throughout the movie, there’s a depth to her gentle eccentricity – her post-hippie openness to experiment with substances, her panic over lobsters and spiders, her refusal to be manipulated by Alvy’s efforts to mold her into someone apparently somber (for him, that implies focused on dying). At first, Annie might seem like an unusual choice to earn an award; she is the love interest in a film told from a male perspective, and the central couple’s arc fails to result in either changing enough accommodate the other. Yet Annie does change, in manners visible and hidden. She simply fails to turn into a more suitable partner for Alvy. Plenty of later rom-coms stole the superficial stuff – neurotic hang-ups, quirky fashions – not fully copying Annie’s ultimate independence.

Lasting Influence and Later Roles

Perhaps Keaton felt cautious of that tendency. After her working relationship with Allen ended, she paused her lighthearted roles; her movie Baby Boom is really her only one from the entirety of the 1980s. However, in her hiatus, Annie Hall, the role possibly more than the unconventional story, became a model for the genre. Actress Meg Ryan, for example, is largely indebted for her comedic roles to Keaton’s skill to embody brains and whimsy at once. This cast Keaton as like a permanent rom-com queen even as she was actually playing matrimonial parts (if contentedly, as in the movie Father of the Bride, or less so, as in The First Wives Club) and/or mothers (see that Christmas movie or the comedy Because I Said So) than independent ladies in love. Even in her reunion with the director, they’re a established married pair brought closer together by comic amateur sleuthing – and she eases into the part smoothly, wonderfully.

But Keaton did have a further love story triumph in the year 2003 with that Nancy Meyers movie, as a dramatist in love with a younger-dating cad (actor Jack Nicholson, naturally). The outcome? Her final Oscar nomination, and a complete niche of romances where senior actresses (typically acted by celebrities, but still!) reclaim their love lives. A key element her death seems like such a shock is that Diane continued creating those movies just last year, a constant multiplex presence. Today viewers must shift from expecting her roles to grasping the significant effect she was on the funny romance as it exists today. Is it tough to imagine modern equivalents of those earlier stars who similarly follow in Keaton’s footsteps, that’s probably because it’s uncommon for an actor of her caliber to devote herself to a category that’s frequently reduced to digital fare for a while now.

A Special Contribution

Consider: there are a dozen performing women who received at least four best actress nominations. It’s uncommon for any performance to begin in a rom-com, not to mention multiple, as was the example of Keaton. {Because her