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Plenty of great performers have appeared in love stories with humor. Usually, when aiming to win an Oscar, they must turn for weightier characters. Diane Keaton, who died unexpectedly, took an opposite path and executed it with seamless ease. Her debut significant performance was in The Godfather, as dramatic an film classic as ever produced. But that same year, she returned to the role of Linda, the focus of an awkward lead’s admiration, in a movie version of the stage play Play It Again, Sam. She persistently switched serious dramas with lighthearted romances during the 1970s, and it was the latter that won her an Oscar for outstanding actress, altering the genre for good.

The Award-Winning Performance

The Oscar statuette was for Annie Hall, helmed and co-scripted by Woody Allen, with Keaton in the lead role, one half of the movie’s fractured love story. The director and star had been in a romantic relationship before making the film, and remained close friends throughout her life; in interviews, Keaton had characterized Annie as a dream iteration of herself, from Allen’s perspective. It might be simple, then, to believe her portrayal involves doing what came naturally. But there’s too much range in Keaton’s work, contrasting her dramatic part and her funny films with Allen and within Annie Hall itself, to underestimate her talent with rom-coms as merely exuding appeal – though she was, of course, incredibly appealing.

Shifting Genres

The film famously functioned as the director’s evolution between more gag-based broad comedies and a authentic manner. Therefore, it has plenty of gags, fantasy sequences, and a improvised tapestry of a romantic memory in between some stinging insights into a doomed romantic relationship. Likewise, Keaton, presides over a transition in U.S. romantic comedies, playing neither the fast-talking screwball type or the sexy scatterbrain famous from the ’50s. Instead, she mixes and matches aspects of both to invent a novel style that still reads as oddly contemporary, halting her assertiveness with uncertain moments.

Watch, for example the scene where Annie and Alvy Singer first connect after a match of tennis, awkwardly exchanging proposals for a lift (although only a single one owns a vehicle). The banter is fast, but zig-zags around unpredictably, with Keaton soloing around her own discomfort before ending up stuck of that famous phrase, a words that embody her anxious charm. The film manifests that feeling in the subsequent moment, as she engages in casual chat while navigating wildly through New York roads. Later, she centers herself performing the song in a cabaret.

Complexity and Freedom

These aren’t examples of the character’s unpredictability. During the entire story, there’s a complexity to her gentle eccentricity – her hippie-hangover willingness to sample narcotics, her panic over lobsters and spiders, her refusal to be manipulated by Alvy’s attempts to turn her into someone outwardly grave (for him, that implies focused on dying). In the beginning, Annie might seem like an odd character to earn an award; she plays the female lead in a movie seen from a man’s point of view, and the protagonists’ trajectory 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 better match for Alvy. Plenty of later rom-coms stole the superficial stuff – neurotic hang-ups, odd clothing – without quite emulating her core self-reliance.

Lasting Influence and Later Roles

Possibly she grew hesitant of that tendency. Post her professional partnership with Allen concluded, she took a break from rom-coms; the film Baby Boom is essentially her sole entry from the entirety of the 1980s. But during her absence, the film Annie Hall, the role possibly more than the free-form film, emerged as a template for the category. Meg Ryan, for example, is largely indebted for her comedic roles to Keaton’s skill to embody brains and whimsy at once. This made Keaton seem like a everlasting comedy royalty despite her real roles being matrimonial parts (if contentedly, as in Father of the Bride, or not as much, as in the film The First Wives Club) and/or mothers (see that Christmas movie or the comedy Because I Said So) than independent ladies in love. Even during her return with the director, they’re a seasoned spouses brought closer together by humorous investigations – and she slips into that role effortlessly, gracefully.

But Keaton did have an additional romantic comedy success in two thousand three with Something’s Gotta Give, as a playwright in love with a older playboy (the star Jack Nicholson, naturally). The result? Her last Academy Award nod, and a whole subgenre of romantic tales where senior actresses (often portrayed by famous faces, but still!) take charge of their destinies. Part of the reason her death seems like such a shock is that she kept producing those movies up until recently, a frequent big-screen star. Now audiences will be pivoting from expecting her roles to grasping the significant effect she was on the funny romance as it exists today. Should it be difficult to recall contemporary counterparts of those earlier stars who emulate her path, the reason may be it’s seldom for a star of her caliber to commit herself to a style that’s mostly been streaming fodder for a while now.

A Unique Legacy

Ponder: there are 10 living female actors who earned several Oscar nods. It’s unusual for a single part to begin in a rom-com, especially not several, as was the situation with Diane. {Because her