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Plenty of accomplished performers have starred in love stories with humor. Typically, if they want to win an Oscar, they need to shift for more serious roles. Diane Keaton, who died unexpectedly, charted a different course and executed it with effortless grace. Her first major film role was in The Godfather, about as serious an cinematic masterpiece as ever produced. But that same year, she returned to the role of the character Linda, the object of a nerdy hero’s affection, in a cinematic take of Broadway’s Play It Again, Sam. She regularly juggled serious dramas with funny love stories across the seventies, and the lighter fare that won her an Oscar for leading actress, changing the genre permanently.

The Award-Winning Performance

That Oscar was for Annie Hall, co-written and directed by Allen, with Keaton in the lead role, a component of the couple’s failed relationship. The director and star dated previously before production, and remained close friends throughout her life; when speaking publicly, Keaton described Annie as an idealized version of herself, as seen by Allen. It might be simple, then, to assume Keaton’s performance required little effort. But there’s too much range in Keaton’s work, both between her Godfather performance and her funny films with Allen and throughout that very movie, to discount her skill with funny romances as merely exuding appeal – though she was, of course, tremendously charming.

Evolving Comedy

Annie Hall famously served as Allen’s shift between broader, joke-heavy films and a realistic approach. Therefore, it has numerous jokes, imaginative scenes, and a improvised tapestry of a love story recollection in between some stinging insights into a fated love affair. In a similar vein, Diane, presides over a transition in U.S. romantic comedies, playing neither the rapid-fire comic lead or the glamorous airhead famous from the ’50s. Instead, she blends and combines aspects of both to forge a fresh approach that still reads as oddly contemporary, cutting her confidence short with her own false-start hesitations.

Watch, for example the sequence with the couple first connect after a tennis game, awkwardly exchanging proposals for a car trip (despite the fact that only one of them has a car). The dialogue is quick, but veers erratically, with Keaton soloing around her unease before concluding with of her whimsical line, a expression that captures her anxious charm. The story embodies that sensibility in the following sequence, as she has indifferent conversation while navigating wildly through city avenues. Later, she composes herself performing the song in a nightclub.

Dimensionality and Independence

These are not instances of Annie being unstable. Throughout the movie, there’s a complexity to her gentle eccentricity – her lingering counterculture curiosity to experiment with substances, her fear of crustaceans and arachnids, her refusal to be manipulated by the protagonist’s tries to mold her into someone apparently somber (for him, that implies preoccupied with mortality). Initially, Annie could appear like an strange pick to receive acclaim; she plays the female lead in a story filtered through a man’s eyes, and the central couple’s arc fails to result in sufficient transformation accommodate the other. However, she transforms, in aspects clear and mysterious. She just doesn’t become a more compatible mate for her co-star. Many subsequent love stories stole the superficial stuff – anxious quirks, quirky fashions – failing to replicate Annie’s ultimate independence.

Lasting Influence and Later Roles

Perhaps Keaton felt cautious of that pattern. Post her professional partnership with Allen concluded, she paused her lighthearted roles; Baby Boom is really her only one from the entirety of the 1980s. However, in her hiatus, the character Annie, the role possibly more than the unconventional story, served as a blueprint for the category. Actress Meg Ryan, for example, owes most of her rom-com career to Diane’s talent to portray intelligence and flightiness together. This rendered Keaton like a permanent rom-com queen while she was in fact portraying matrimonial parts (be it joyfully, as in the movie Father of the Bride, or less so, as in the film The First Wives Club) and/or moms (see that Christmas movie or the comedy Because I Said So) than independent ladies in love. Even during her return with Allen, they’re a seasoned spouses 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 the film Something’s Gotta Give, as a playwright in love with a younger-dating cad (actor Jack Nicholson, naturally). The result? One more Oscar recognition, and a entire category of romantic tales where older women (typically acted by celebrities, but still!) take charge of their destinies. A key element her passing feels so sudden is that Diane continued creating such films just last year, a regular cinema fixture. Now fans are turning from expecting her roles to grasping the significant effect she was on the rom-com genre as it exists today. If it’s harder to think of present-day versions of those earlier stars who emulate her path, that’s probably because it’s rare for a performer of her talent to commit herself to a genre that’s frequently reduced to digital fare for a recent period.

A Special Contribution

Reflect: there are 10 living female actors who have been nominated multiple times. It’s uncommon for any performance to originate in a romantic comedy, not to mention multiple, as was the case for Keaton. {Because her