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Plenty of accomplished female actors have performed in rom-coms. Usually, if they want to earn an Academy Award, they need to shift for weightier characters. The late Diane Keaton, who passed away recently, followed a reverse trajectory and pulled it off with seamless ease. Her first major film role was in the classic The Godfather, about as serious an American masterpiece as ever created. Yet in the same year, she reprised the part of the character Linda, the object of a nerdy hero’s affection, in a movie version of the stage play Play It Again, Sam. She continued to alternate intense dramas with romantic comedies during the 1970s, and it was the latter that secured her the Oscar for leading actress, transforming the category forever.

The Award-Winning Performance

The Oscar statuette was for the film Annie Hall, helmed and co-scripted by Woody Allen, with Keaton portraying Annie, a component of the couple’s failed relationship. Woody and Diane dated previously prior to filming, and stayed good friends throughout her life; when speaking publicly, Keaton had characterized Annie as a perfect image of herself, as seen by Allen. One could assume, then, to think her acting meant being herself. However, her versatility in Keaton’s work, from her Godfather role and her Allen comedies and throughout that very movie, to dismiss her facility with rom-coms as simply turning on the charm – although she remained, of course, highly charismatic.

Evolving Comedy

Annie Hall famously served as the director’s evolution between more gag-based broad comedies and a authentic manner. As such, it has lots of humor, imaginative scenes, and a improvised tapestry of a relationship memoir mixed with painful truths into a fated love affair. Keaton, similarly, led an evolution in Hollywood love stories, portraying neither the rapid-fire comic lead or the glamorous airhead famous from the ’50s. Instead, she mixes and matches aspects of both to create something entirely new that still reads as oddly contemporary, interrupting her own boldness with her own false-start hesitations.

Observe, for instance the sequence with the couple initially hit it off after a tennis game, stumbling through reciprocal offers for a lift (despite the fact that only just one drives). The exchange is rapid, but veers erratically, with Keaton navigating her nervousness before ending up stuck of that famous phrase, a phrase that encapsulates her nervous whimsy. The story embodies that tone in the following sequence, as she makes blasé small talk while navigating wildly through Manhattan streets. Subsequently, she centers herself delivering the tune in a club venue.

Depth and Autonomy

These aren’t examples of the character’s unpredictability. During the entire story, there’s a complexity to her playful craziness – her lingering counterculture curiosity to try drugs, her fear of crustaceans and arachnids, her resistance to control by Alvy’s attempts to mold her into someone outwardly grave (in his view, that signifies death-obsessed). At first, Annie could appear like an unusual choice to win an Oscar; 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 sufficient transformation to suit each other. But Annie evolves, in manners visible and hidden. She simply fails to turn into a more suitable partner for the male lead. Plenty of later rom-coms took the obvious elements – neurotic hang-ups, quirky fashions – without quite emulating her core self-reliance.

Enduring Impact and Mature Parts

Maybe Keaton was wary of that pattern. Following her collaboration with Allen concluded, she paused her lighthearted roles; Baby Boom is practically her single outing from the whole decade of the eighties. Yet while she was gone, Annie Hall, the role possibly more than the loosely structured movie, became a model for the category. Meg Ryan, for example, owes most of her rom-com career to Diane’s talent to portray intelligence and flightiness together. This cast Keaton as like a permanent rom-com queen even as she was actually playing married characters (if contentedly, as in that family comedy, or more strained, as in that ensemble comedy) and/or moms (see The Family Stone or the comedy Because I Said So) than independent ladies in love. Even in her reunion with Woody Allen, they’re a long-married couple united more deeply by humorous investigations – and she slips into that role smoothly, wonderfully.

But Keaton did have another major rom-com hit in the year 2003 with Something’s Gotta Give, as a playwright in love with a younger-dating cad (the star Jack Nicholson, naturally). The outcome? One more Oscar recognition, and a entire category of romances where older women (typically acted by celebrities, but still!) take charge of their destinies. A key element her loss is so startling is that she kept producing these stories just last year, a regular cinema fixture. Now fans are turning from assuming her availability to realizing what an enormous influence she was on the rom-com genre as it is recognized. Should it be difficult to recall contemporary counterparts of those earlier stars who walk in her shoes, the reason may be it’s uncommon for an actor of Keaton’s skill to commit herself to a category that’s often just online content for a while now.

A Special Contribution

Reflect: there are ten active actresses who have been nominated multiple times. It’s unusual for a single part to begin in a rom-com, especially not several, as was the example of Keaton. {Because her