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Numerous talented performers have performed in romantic comedies. Usually, should they desire to earn an Academy Award, they need to shift for more serious roles. Diane Keaton, who passed away recently, followed a reverse trajectory and executed it with disarmingly natural. Her initial breakout part was in The Godfather, as weighty an American masterpiece as ever produced. However, concurrently, she returned to the role of the character Linda, the object of a nerdy hero’s affection, in a film adaptation of the stage play Play It Again, Sam. She continued to alternate serious dramas with funny love stories during the 1970s, and the comedies that secured her the Oscar for best actress, changing the genre permanently.

The Oscar-Winning Role

The Oscar statuette 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 before making the film, and continued as pals throughout her life; in interviews, Keaton described Annie as a perfect image of herself, through Allen’s eyes. It might be simple, then, to assume Keaton’s performance required little effort. However, her versatility in her performances, from her Godfather role and her Allen comedies and inside Annie Hall alone, to dismiss her facility with funny romances as merely exuding appeal – even if she was, of course, tremendously charming.

Shifting Genres

The film famously functioned as Allen’s shift between more gag-based broad comedies 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. Likewise, Keaton, presides over a transition in Hollywood love stories, portraying neither the screwball-era speed-talker or the sexy scatterbrain popularized in the 1950s. Rather, she fuses and merges traits from both to invent a novel style that feels modern even now, interrupting her own boldness with nervous pauses.

Watch, for example the moment when Annie and Alvy initially hit it off after a match of tennis, awkwardly exchanging proposals for a lift (although only a single one owns a vehicle). The exchange is rapid, but meanders unexpectedly, with Keaton soloing around her own discomfort before winding up in a cul-de-sac of that famous phrase, a expression that captures her anxious charm. The movie physicalizes that feeling in the next scene, as she makes blasé small talk while driving recklessly through city avenues. Afterward, she finds her footing delivering the tune in a nightclub.

Complexity and Freedom

These are not instances of Annie being unstable. Throughout the movie, there’s a complexity to her playful craziness – her hippie-hangover willingness to sample narcotics, her anxiety about sea creatures and insects, her resistance to control by the protagonist’s tries to shape her into someone more superficially serious (in his view, that signifies preoccupied with mortality). Initially, the character may look like an odd character to win an Oscar; she plays the female lead in a story filtered through a man’s eyes, and the main pair’s journey fails to result in adequate growth to make it work. But Annie evolves, in manners visible and hidden. She just doesn’t become a more suitable partner for Alvy. Plenty of later rom-coms stole the superficial stuff – nervous habits, eccentric styles – failing to replicate Annie’s ultimate independence.

Ongoing Legacy and Senior Characters

Possibly she grew hesitant of that trend. Post her professional partnership with Woody finished, she stepped away from romantic comedies; Baby Boom is practically her single outing from the whole decade of the eighties. Yet while she was gone, Annie Hall, the persona even more than the loosely structured movie, emerged as a template for the genre. Star Meg Ryan, for example, owes most of her rom-com career to Keaton’s skill to portray intelligence and flightiness together. This cast Keaton as like a permanent rom-com queen while she was in fact portraying more wives (whether happily, as in Father of the Bride, or more strained, as in that ensemble comedy) and/or moms (see that Christmas movie or that mother-daughter story) than single gals falling in love. Even during her return with Allen, they’re a established married pair drawn nearer by comic amateur sleuthing – and she slips into that role effortlessly, gracefully.

But Keaton did have an additional romantic comedy success in two thousand three with that Nancy Meyers movie, as a playwright in love with a man who dates younger women (Jack Nicholson, naturally). What happened? Her last Academy Award nod, and a whole subgenre of love stories where mature females (usually played by movie stars, but still!) take charge of their destinies. Part of the reason her death seems like such a shock is that she kept producing such films just last year, a regular cinema fixture. Now audiences will be pivoting from assuming her availability to understanding the huge impact she was on the funny romance as we know it. Should it be difficult to recall present-day versions of those earlier stars who similarly follow in Keaton’s footsteps, that’s probably because it’s seldom for a star of her talent to commit herself to a category that’s mostly been streaming fodder for a recent period.

A Unique Legacy

Consider: there are 10 living female actors who received at least four best actress nominations. It’s rare for one of those roles to originate in a romantic comedy, not to mention multiple, as was the example of Keaton. {Because her