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Plenty of talented actresses have performed in romantic comedies. Ordinarily, should they desire to earn an Academy Award, they have to reach for weightier characters. The late Diane Keaton, whose recent passing occurred, took an opposite path and executed it with seamless ease. Her initial breakout part was in The Godfather, as weighty an film classic as has ever been made. But that same year, she reprised the part of the character Linda, the love interest of a geeky protagonist, in a film adaptation of the stage play Play It Again, Sam. She persistently switched heavy films with lighthearted romances throughout the ’70s, and the comedies that secured her the Oscar for outstanding actress, changing the genre permanently.

The Academy Award Part

That Oscar was for the film Annie Hall, co-written and directed by Allen, with Keaton portraying Annie, a component of the couple’s failed relationship. The director and star dated previously before making the film, and continued as pals throughout her life; in interviews, Keaton had characterized Annie as a perfect image of herself, as seen by Allen. It might be simple, then, to assume Keaton’s performance involves doing what came naturally. Yet her breadth in Keaton’s work, both between her Godfather performance and her comedic collaborations and inside Annie Hall alone, to dismiss her facility with rom-coms as simply turning on the charm – even if she was, of course, highly charismatic.

A Transition in Style

The film famously functioned as Allen’s shift between broader, joke-heavy films and a more naturalistic style. As such, it has lots of humor, fantasy sequences, and a improvised tapestry of a relationship memoir mixed with painful truths into a doomed romantic relationship. Keaton, similarly, oversaw a change in American rom-coms, portraying neither the fast-talking screwball type or the sexy scatterbrain common in the fifties. On the contrary, she blends and combines aspects of both to create something entirely new that still reads as oddly contemporary, halting her assertiveness with nervous pauses.

Observe, for instance the scene where Annie and Alvy Singer initially bond after a match of tennis, awkwardly exchanging proposals for a lift (even though only a single one owns a vehicle). The banter is fast, but veers erratically, with Keaton soloing around her unease before winding up in a cul-de-sac of that famous phrase, a expression that captures her quirky unease. The story embodies that tone in the subsequent moment, as she makes blasé small talk while driving recklessly through New York roads. Subsequently, she centers herself delivering the tune in a nightclub.

Dimensionality and Independence

These aren’t examples of Annie acting erratic. Throughout the movie, there’s a complexity to her light zaniness – her post-hippie openness to experiment with substances, her fear of crustaceans and arachnids, her refusal to be manipulated by the protagonist’s tries to mold her into someone outwardly grave (which for him means focused on dying). At first, Annie could appear like an unusual choice to earn an award; she’s the romantic lead in a movie seen from a man’s point of view, and the protagonists’ trajectory fails to result in sufficient transformation to make it work. Yet Annie does change, in aspects clear and mysterious. She merely avoids becoming a more suitable partner for her co-star. Plenty of later rom-coms took the obvious elements – neurotic hang-ups, eccentric styles – failing to replicate her final autonomy.

Enduring Impact and Mature Parts

Possibly she grew hesitant of that pattern. Following her collaboration with Woody finished, she took a break from rom-coms; her movie Baby Boom is essentially her sole entry from the entirety of the 1980s. However, in her hiatus, the film Annie Hall, the persona even more than the unconventional story, became a model for the category. Star 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 everlasting comedy royalty while she was in fact portraying married characters (if contentedly, as in the movie Father of the Bride, or not as much, as in The First Wives Club) and/or moms (see the holiday film The Family Stone or the comedy Because I Said So) than unattached women finding romance. Even in her comeback with Allen, they’re a long-married couple brought closer together by comic amateur sleuthing – and she eases into the part effortlessly, gracefully.

Yet Diane experienced an additional romantic comedy success in two thousand three with Something’s Gotta Give, as a dramatist in love with a younger-dating cad (actor Jack Nicholson, naturally). The outcome? One more Oscar recognition, and a whole subgenre of romantic tales where older women (typically acted by celebrities, but still!) reclaim their love lives. A key element her death seems like such a shock is that she kept producing such films up until recently, a constant multiplex presence. Today viewers must shift from taking that presence for granted to grasping the significant effect she was on the funny romance as it exists today. Should it be difficult to recall present-day versions of Meg Ryan or Goldie Hawn who similarly follow in Keaton’s footsteps, the reason may be it’s rare for a performer of her caliber to devote herself to a style that’s often just online content for a long time.

A Unique Legacy

Ponder: there are ten active actresses who received at least four best actress nominations. It’s rare for one of those roles to originate in a romantic comedy, especially not several, as was the situation with Diane. {Because her