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Many accomplished performers have appeared in love stories with humor. Usually, if they want to receive Oscar recognition, they need to shift for dramatic parts. The late Diane Keaton, whose recent passing occurred, took an opposite path and made it look effortless grace. Her initial breakout part was in the classic The Godfather, as weighty an cinematic masterpiece as ever created. However, concurrently, she revisited the character of the character Linda, the love interest of a geeky protagonist, in a movie version of the theatrical production Play It Again, Sam. She continued to alternate intense dramas with romantic comedies throughout the ’70s, and the lighter fare that earned her the Academy Award for best actress, altering the genre for good.

The Award-Winning Performance

That Oscar was for Annie Hall, written and directed by Woody Allen, with Keaton as the title character, part of the film’s broken romance. Allen and Keaton dated previously before making the film, and stayed good friends for the rest of her life; when speaking publicly, Keaton had characterized Annie as an idealized version of herself, through Allen’s eyes. It would be easy, then, to think her acting involves doing what came naturally. But there’s too much range in her acting, both between her Godfather performance and her Allen comedies and throughout that very movie, to underestimate her talent with rom-coms as merely exuding appeal – although she remained, of course, highly charismatic.

Shifting Genres

Annie Hall famously served as Allen’s transition between more gag-based broad comedies and a authentic manner. As such, it has numerous jokes, imaginative scenes, and a improvised tapestry of a relationship memoir alongside sharp observations into a doomed romantic relationship. Likewise, Keaton, oversaw a change in U.S. romantic comedies, portraying neither the rapid-fire comic lead or the bombshell ditz famous from the ’50s. Rather, she fuses and merges aspects of both to invent a novel style that feels modern even now, interrupting her own boldness with nervous pauses.

Watch, for example the sequence with the couple initially bond after a game on the courts, fumbling over ping-ponging invitations for a car trip (even though only just one drives). The banter is fast, but veers erratically, with Keaton navigating her unease before ending up stuck of “la di da”, a words that embody her nervous whimsy. The story embodies that tone in the following sequence, as she engages in casual chat while navigating wildly through Manhattan streets. Subsequently, she finds her footing delivering the tune in a club venue.

Dimensionality and Independence

This is not evidence of Annie being unstable. Throughout the movie, there’s a dimensionality to her playful craziness – her hippie-hangover willingness to experiment with substances, her anxiety about sea creatures and insects, her refusal to be manipulated by Alvy’s attempts to turn her into someone outwardly grave (for him, that implies death-obsessed). At first, the character may look like an unusual choice to win an Oscar; she’s the romantic lead in a film told from a male perspective, and the main pair’s journey fails to result in sufficient transformation accommodate the other. Yet Annie does change, in manners visible and hidden. She simply fails to turn into a better match for her co-star. Plenty of later rom-coms stole the superficial stuff – neurotic hang-ups, eccentric styles – without quite emulating her final autonomy.

Ongoing Legacy and Senior Characters

Perhaps Keaton felt cautious of that trend. Post her professional partnership with Allen concluded, she paused her lighthearted roles; Baby Boom is essentially her sole entry from the whole decade of the eighties. Yet while she was gone, Annie Hall, the role possibly more than the free-form film, served as a blueprint for the category. Meg Ryan, for example, is largely indebted for her comedic roles to Keaton’s skill to portray intelligence and flightiness together. This rendered Keaton like a timeless love story icon while she was in fact portraying more wives (whether happily, as in Father of the Bride, or more strained, as in The First Wives Club) and/or parental figures (see the holiday film The Family Stone or the comedy Because I Said So) than unattached women finding romance. Even in her reunion with Allen, they’re a long-married couple drawn nearer by comic amateur sleuthing – and she fits the character effortlessly, gracefully.

But Keaton did have a further love story triumph in two thousand three with that Nancy Meyers movie, as a playwright in love with a man who dates younger women (actor Jack Nicholson, naturally). What happened? Her last Academy Award nod, and a whole subgenre of romances where senior actresses (typically acted by celebrities, but still!) reassert their romantic and/or social agency. One factor her death seems like such a shock is that Keaton was still making such films up until recently, a constant multiplex presence. Now audiences will be pivoting from assuming her availability to understanding the huge impact she was on the funny romance as we know it. Should it be difficult to recall contemporary counterparts of Meg Ryan or Goldie Hawn who similarly follow in Keaton’s footsteps, that’s likely since it’s rare for a performer of Keaton’s skill to dedicate herself to a genre that’s often just online content for a recent period.

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, let alone half of them, as was the case for Keaton. {Because her