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Plenty of talented female actors have appeared in love stories with humor. Ordinarily, if they want to win an Oscar, they need to shift for dramatic parts. Diane Keaton, who passed away recently, charted a different course and pulled it off with disarmingly natural. Her first major film role was in the classic The Godfather, as dramatic an cinematic masterpiece as ever created. Yet in the same year, she returned to the role of Linda, the focus of an awkward lead’s admiration, in a movie version of the theatrical production Play It Again, Sam. She continued to alternate serious dramas with lighthearted romances throughout the ’70s, and it was the latter that earned her the Academy Award for outstanding actress, transforming the category forever.

The Oscar-Winning Role

The award was for Annie Hall, written and directed 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 prior to filming, and remained close friends throughout her life; during conversations, Keaton had characterized Annie as an idealized version of herself, through Allen’s eyes. One could assume, then, to think her acting meant being herself. Yet her breadth in her performances, contrasting her dramatic part and her comedic collaborations and within Annie Hall itself, to underestimate her talent with romantic comedy as simply turning on the charm – even if she was, of course, highly charismatic.

Evolving Comedy

Annie Hall notably acted as Allen’s transition between more gag-based broad comedies and a more naturalistic style. Consequently, it has numerous jokes, imaginative scenes, and a loose collage of a relationship memoir in between some stinging insights into a ill-fated romance. Likewise, Keaton, presides over a transition in U.S. romantic comedies, portraying neither the screwball-era speed-talker or the glamorous airhead popularized in the 1950s. On the contrary, she blends and combines traits from both to invent a novel style that feels modern even now, halting her assertiveness with nervous pauses.

Watch, for example the sequence with the couple initially bond after a tennis game, awkwardly exchanging proposals for a ride (although only one of them has a car). The banter is fast, but zig-zags around unpredictably, with Keaton navigating her unease before concluding with of “la di da”, a phrase that encapsulates her nervous whimsy. The film manifests that sensibility in the subsequent moment, as she makes blasé small talk while driving recklessly through Manhattan streets. Afterward, she composes herself singing It Had to Be You in a nightclub.

Depth and Autonomy

These are not instances of the character’s unpredictability. During the entire story, there’s a depth to her gentle eccentricity – her post-hippie openness to experiment with substances, her anxiety about sea creatures and insects, her resistance to control by the protagonist’s tries to turn her into someone more superficially serious (in his view, that signifies focused on dying). At first, Annie could appear like an unusual choice to earn an award; she plays the female lead in a movie seen from a man’s point of view, and the central couple’s arc doesn’t bend toward adequate growth to make it work. But Annie evolves, in ways both observable and unknowable. She simply fails to turn into a more suitable partner for the male lead. Plenty of later rom-coms borrowed the surface traits – nervous habits, odd clothing – failing to replicate her core self-reliance.

Ongoing Legacy and Senior Characters

Maybe Keaton was wary of that pattern. Following her collaboration with Allen ended, she took a break from rom-coms; Baby Boom is really her only one from the whole decade of the eighties. Yet while she was gone, the film Annie Hall, the role possibly more than the loosely structured movie, served as a blueprint for the genre. Meg Ryan, for example, credits much of her love story success to Keaton’s ability to embody brains and whimsy at once. This cast Keaton as like a everlasting comedy royalty even as she was actually playing married characters (if contentedly, as in the movie Father of the Bride, or more strained, as in the film The First Wives Club) and/or parental figures (see the holiday film The Family Stone or that mother-daughter story) than single gals falling in love. Even in her comeback with Woody Allen, they’re a long-married couple united more deeply by funny detective work – and she fits the character effortlessly, gracefully.

However, Keaton also enjoyed an additional romantic comedy success in two thousand three with Something’s Gotta Give, as a writer in love with a younger-dating cad (actor Jack Nicholson, naturally). What happened? Her final Oscar nomination, and a entire category of romances where older women (usually played by movie stars, but still!) reclaim their love lives. One factor her loss is so startling is that Keaton was still making those movies up until recently, a regular cinema fixture. Now audiences will be pivoting from assuming her availability to grasping the significant effect she was on the rom-com genre as it is recognized. Should it be difficult to recall modern equivalents of such actresses who walk in her shoes, that’s probably because it’s seldom for a star of her caliber to dedicate herself to a style that’s often just online content for a long time.

A Special Contribution

Consider: there are a dozen performing women who earned several Oscar nods. It’s unusual for a single part to start in a light love story, not to mention multiple, as was the case for Keaton. {Because her