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Plenty of great performers have starred in romantic comedies. Ordinarily, when aiming to earn an Academy Award, they have to reach for more serious roles. The late Diane Keaton, who died unexpectedly, followed a reverse trajectory and pulled it off with seamless ease. Her first major film role was in The Godfather, about as serious an film classic as ever created. But that same year, she reprised the part of the character Linda, the object of a nerdy hero’s affection, in a cinematic take of Broadway’s Play It Again, Sam. She persistently switched intense dramas with funny love stories during the 1970s, and it was the latter that secured her the Oscar for best actress, transforming the category forever.

The Award-Winning Performance

The Oscar statuette was for Annie Hall, co-written and directed by Allen, with Keaton in the lead role, part of the film’s broken romance. Allen and Keaton were once romantically involved before making the film, and remained close friends for the rest of her life; during conversations, Keaton had characterized Annie as a dream iteration of herself, through Allen’s eyes. It would be easy, then, to assume Keaton’s performance required little effort. Yet her breadth in her acting, contrasting her dramatic part and her comedic collaborations and inside Annie Hall alone, to underestimate her talent with romantic comedy as just being charming – even if she was, of course, incredibly appealing.

Shifting Genres

Annie Hall notably acted as Allen’s shift between broader, joke-heavy films and a authentic manner. As such, it has numerous jokes, dreamlike moments, and a loose collage of a romantic memory in between some stinging insights into a ill-fated romance. Keaton, similarly, oversaw a change in American rom-coms, portraying neither the rapid-fire comic lead or the sexy scatterbrain popularized in the 1950s. On the contrary, she fuses and merges traits from both to forge a fresh approach that feels modern even now, interrupting her own boldness with nervous pauses.

Observe, for instance the scene where Annie and Alvy Singer first connect after a match of tennis, stumbling through reciprocal offers for a lift (even though only just one drives). The dialogue is quick, but veers erratically, with Keaton navigating her own discomfort before winding up in a cul-de-sac of “la di da”, a words that embody her nervous whimsy. The story embodies that tone in the subsequent moment, as she has indifferent conversation while navigating wildly through New York roads. Subsequently, she composes herself delivering the tune in a cabaret.

Depth and Autonomy

These are not instances of Annie being unstable. During the entire story, there’s a depth to her gentle eccentricity – her hippie-hangover willingness to experiment with substances, her panic over lobsters and spiders, her unwillingness to be shaped by Alvy’s attempts to turn her into someone more superficially serious (for him, that implies focused on dying). At first, Annie could appear like an odd character to receive acclaim; she’s the romantic lead in a story filtered through a man’s eyes, and the central couple’s arc doesn’t bend toward either changing enough accommodate the other. However, she transforms, in manners visible and hidden. She simply fails to turn into a more compatible mate for Alvy. Plenty of later rom-coms borrowed the surface traits – anxious quirks, quirky fashions – not fully copying her core self-reliance.

Enduring Impact and Mature Parts

Perhaps Keaton felt cautious of that pattern. After her working relationship with Allen ended, she took a break from rom-coms; the film Baby Boom is practically her single outing from the whole decade of the eighties. However, in her hiatus, the character Annie, the character perhaps moreso than the unconventional story, emerged as a template for the category. Actress Meg Ryan, for example, is largely indebted for her comedic roles to Keaton’s skill to embody brains and whimsy at once. This rendered Keaton like a permanent rom-com queen even as she was actually playing more wives (be it joyfully, as in the movie Father of the Bride, or not as much, as in The First Wives Club) and/or moms (see The Family Stone or Because I Said So) than unattached women finding romance. Even in her comeback with Woody Allen, they’re a long-married couple drawn nearer by comic amateur sleuthing – and she slips into that role effortlessly, gracefully.

However, Keaton also enjoyed an additional romantic comedy success in two thousand three with Something’s Gotta Give, as a playwright in love with a man who dates younger women (actor Jack Nicholson, naturally). The outcome? One more Oscar recognition, and a whole subgenre of romantic tales where older women (usually played by movie stars, but still!) reclaim their love lives. A key element her loss is so startling is that Diane continued creating those movies as recently as last year, a frequent big-screen star. Today viewers must shift from expecting her roles to grasping the significant effect she was on the romantic comedy as it is recognized. Is it tough to imagine modern equivalents of such actresses who walk in her shoes, that’s probably because it’s uncommon for an actor of her talent to dedicate herself to a category that’s often just online content for a recent period.

A Unique Legacy

Ponder: there are a dozen performing women who received at least four best actress nominations. It’s rare for one of those roles to begin in a rom-com, especially not several, as was the situation with Diane. {Because her