From the film Annie Hall to Something’s Gotta Give: the actress Diane Keaton Was the Quintessential Comedy Queen.

Many accomplished actresses have starred in love stories with humor. Typically, when aiming to earn an Academy Award, they have to reach for more serious roles. The late Diane Keaton, whose recent passing occurred, took an opposite path and pulled it off with disarmingly natural. Her debut significant performance was in The Godfather, about as serious an American masterpiece as ever produced. Yet in the same year, she reprised the part of the character Linda, the object of a nerdy hero’s affection, in a cinematic take of the stage play Play It Again, Sam. She persistently switched serious dramas with romantic comedies throughout the ’70s, and it was the latter that earned her the Academy Award for outstanding actress, transforming the category forever.

The Award-Winning Performance

The Oscar statuette was for Annie Hall, helmed and co-scripted 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 continued as pals until her passing; when speaking publicly, Keaton portrayed Annie as a dream iteration of herself, through Allen’s eyes. It might be simple, then, to assume Keaton’s performance required little effort. However, her versatility in her acting, from her Godfather role and her funny films with Allen and inside Annie Hall alone, to underestimate her talent with funny romances as just being charming – although she remained, of course, highly charismatic.

A Transition in Style

The film famously functioned as Allen’s transition between slapstick-oriented movies and a realistic approach. Therefore, it has plenty of gags, imaginative scenes, and a improvised tapestry of a love story recollection alongside sharp observations into a ill-fated romance. In a similar vein, Diane, presides over a transition in American rom-coms, playing neither the screwball-era speed-talker or the sexy scatterbrain popularized in the 1950s. On the contrary, she mixes and matches traits from both to forge a fresh approach that seems current today, interrupting her own boldness with uncertain moments.

Watch, for example the sequence with the couple first connect after a game on the courts, stumbling through reciprocal offers for a lift (although only just one drives). The exchange is rapid, but veers erratically, with Keaton navigating her nervousness before ending up stuck of that famous phrase, a expression that captures her quirky unease. The film manifests that feeling in the subsequent moment, as she makes blasé small talk while driving recklessly through New York roads. Later, she centers herself delivering the tune in a nightclub.

Dimensionality and Independence

These aren’t examples of Annie being unstable. During the entire story, there’s a complexity to her playful craziness – her hippie-hangover willingness to sample narcotics, her fear of crustaceans and arachnids, her resistance to control by Alvy’s efforts to shape her into someone apparently somber (for him, that implies preoccupied with mortality). At first, Annie might seem like an unusual choice to win an Oscar; she is the love interest in a movie seen from a man’s point of view, and the main pair’s journey doesn’t lead to either changing enough to suit each other. But Annie evolves, in aspects clear and mysterious. She merely avoids becoming a better match for Alvy. Many subsequent love stories borrowed the surface traits – anxious quirks, odd clothing – failing to replicate Annie’s ultimate independence.

Enduring Impact and Mature Parts

Perhaps Keaton felt cautious of that tendency. Following her collaboration with Allen concluded, she stepped away from romantic comedies; the film Baby Boom is practically her single outing from the whole decade of the eighties. Yet while she was gone, the film Annie Hall, the role possibly more than the free-form film, emerged as a template for the category. Meg Ryan, for example, credits much of her love story success to Keaton’s ability to embody brains and whimsy at once. This made Keaton seem like a permanent rom-com queen even as she was actually playing matrimonial parts (whether happily, as in the movie Father of the Bride, or less so, as in the film The First Wives Club) and/or moms (see The Family Stone or that mother-daughter story) than independent ladies in love. Even in her reunion with Woody Allen, they’re a long-married couple drawn nearer by comic amateur sleuthing – and she eases into the part smoothly, wonderfully.

However, Keaton also enjoyed an additional romantic comedy success in 2003 with the film Something’s Gotta Give, as a dramatist in love with a older playboy (Jack Nicholson, naturally). The outcome? Her last Academy Award nod, and a entire category of romantic tales where mature females (often portrayed by famous faces, but still!) reassert their romantic and/or social agency. A key element her loss is so startling is that Diane continued creating those movies as recently as last year, a regular cinema fixture. Now fans are turning from assuming her availability to grasping the significant effect she was on the funny romance as we know it. Should it be difficult to recall present-day versions of those earlier stars who emulate her path, that’s probably because it’s rare for a performer of Keaton’s skill to devote herself to a genre that’s frequently reduced to digital fare for a long time.

A Unique Legacy

Ponder: there are a dozen performing women who have been nominated multiple times. It’s rare for one of those roles to originate in a romantic comedy, especially not several, as was the case for Keaton. {Because her