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Many talented performers have appeared in rom-coms. Usually, should they desire to receive Oscar recognition, they must turn for weightier characters. Diane Keaton, who died unexpectedly, followed a reverse trajectory and executed it with effortless grace. Her initial breakout part was in the classic The Godfather, as dramatic an American masterpiece as ever produced. However, concurrently, she reprised the part of Linda, the focus of an awkward lead’s admiration, in a movie version of Broadway’s Play It Again, Sam. She continued to alternate intense dramas with lighthearted romances across the seventies, and the comedies that earned her the Academy Award for leading actress, changing the genre permanently.

The Academy Award Part

The award was for Annie Hall, helmed and co-scripted by Woody Allen, with Keaton in the lead role, a component of the couple’s failed relationship. Woody and Diane dated previously prior to filming, and stayed good friends until her passing; when speaking publicly, Keaton had characterized Annie as a dream iteration of herself, from Allen’s perspective. It might be simple, then, to assume Keaton’s performance required little effort. But there’s too much range in her acting, from her Godfather role and her funny films with Allen and within Annie Hall itself, to dismiss her facility with rom-coms as just being charming – although she remained, of course, highly charismatic.

A Transition in Style

Annie Hall famously served as the director’s evolution between broader, joke-heavy films and a more naturalistic style. Consequently, it has lots of humor, dreamlike moments, and a freewheeling patchwork of a relationship memoir alongside sharp observations into a fated love affair. In a similar vein, Diane, presides over a transition in American rom-coms, embodying neither the rapid-fire comic lead or the bombshell ditz common in the fifties. On the contrary, she fuses and merges traits from both to invent a novel style that seems current today, interrupting her own boldness with nervous pauses.

See, as an example the scene where Annie and Alvy Singer initially hit it off after a match of tennis, stumbling through reciprocal offers for a car trip (although only a single one owns a vehicle). The banter is fast, but meanders unexpectedly, with Keaton soloing around her nervousness before ending up stuck of her whimsical line, a phrase that encapsulates her anxious charm. The story embodies that sensibility in the next scene, as she engages in casual chat while navigating wildly through New York roads. Subsequently, she centers herself delivering the tune in a nightclub.

Dimensionality and Independence

These are not instances of Annie acting erratic. Throughout the movie, there’s a dimensionality to her light zaniness – her post-hippie openness to try drugs, her anxiety about sea creatures and insects, her refusal to be manipulated by the protagonist’s tries to mold her into someone apparently somber (which for him means focused on dying). In the beginning, the character may look 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 main pair’s journey doesn’t bend toward either changing enough to make it work. However, she transforms, in manners visible and hidden. She simply fails to turn into a more compatible mate for the male lead. Many subsequent love stories took the obvious elements – anxious quirks, quirky fashions – without quite emulating Annie’s ultimate independence.

Ongoing Legacy and Senior Characters

Perhaps Keaton felt cautious of that trend. Post her professional partnership with Allen concluded, she took a break from rom-coms; her movie Baby Boom is essentially her sole entry from the entirety of the 1980s. Yet while she was gone, Annie Hall, the persona even more than the free-form film, became a model for the category. Actress Meg Ryan, for example, owes most of her rom-com career to Keaton’s ability to portray intelligence and flightiness together. This made Keaton seem like a everlasting comedy royalty even as she was actually playing married characters (be it joyfully, as in the movie Father of the Bride, or not as much, as in The First Wives Club) and/or mothers (see The Family Stone or Because I Said So) than single gals falling in love. Even in her reunion with Allen, they’re a long-married couple drawn nearer by humorous investigations – and she fits the character effortlessly, gracefully.

Yet Diane experienced an additional romantic comedy success in 2003 with that Nancy Meyers movie, as a dramatist in love with a man who dates younger women (actor Jack Nicholson, naturally). The outcome? One more Oscar recognition, and a whole subgenre of love stories where older women (often portrayed by famous faces, but still!) reassert their romantic and/or social agency. Part of the reason her loss is so startling is that Keaton was still making these stories up until recently, a constant multiplex presence. Now audiences will be pivoting from expecting her roles to realizing what an enormous influence she was on the funny romance as we know it. If it’s harder to think of present-day versions of those earlier stars who walk in her shoes, the reason may be it’s uncommon for an actor of Keaton’s skill to devote herself to a genre that’s mostly been streaming fodder for a while now.

A Special Contribution

Consider: there are a dozen performing women who received at least four best actress nominations. It’s rare for one of those roles to start in a light love story, not to mention multiple, as was the case for Keaton. {Because her