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Numerous great actresses have performed in love stories with humor. Ordinarily, if they want to earn an Academy Award, they must turn for weightier characters. The late Diane Keaton, whose recent passing occurred, took an opposite path and pulled it off with effortless grace. Her debut significant performance was in The Godfather, about as serious an cinematic masterpiece as ever created. However, concurrently, 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 lighthearted romances across the seventies, and it was the latter that secured her the Oscar for leading actress, altering the genre for good.

The Oscar-Winning Role

The Oscar statuette was for Annie Hall, written and directed 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 continued as pals for the rest of her life; when speaking publicly, Keaton described Annie as an idealized version of herself, as seen by Allen. One could assume, then, to believe her portrayal required little effort. However, her versatility in her acting, contrasting her dramatic part and her Allen comedies and within Annie Hall itself, to dismiss her facility with funny romances as just being charming – though she was, of course, incredibly appealing.

Shifting Genres

The film famously functioned as Allen’s shift between broader, joke-heavy films and a authentic manner. As such, it has plenty of gags, imaginative scenes, and a freewheeling patchwork of a relationship memoir in between some stinging insights into a fated love affair. In a similar vein, Diane, oversaw a change in U.S. romantic comedies, embodying neither the rapid-fire comic lead or the glamorous airhead famous from the ’50s. On the contrary, she mixes and matches aspects of both to create something entirely new that seems current today, interrupting her own boldness with her own false-start hesitations.

Observe, for instance the scene where Annie and Alvy Singer first connect after a game on the courts, stumbling through reciprocal offers for a lift (despite the fact that only one of them has a car). The banter is fast, but meanders unexpectedly, with Keaton navigating her nervousness before ending up stuck of that famous phrase, a phrase that encapsulates her quirky unease. The film manifests that tone in the following sequence, as she engages in casual chat while driving recklessly through New York roads. Subsequently, she composes herself delivering the tune in a cabaret.

Complexity and Freedom

These are not instances of Annie being unstable. Throughout the movie, there’s a dimensionality to her light zaniness – her post-hippie openness to try drugs, her fear of crustaceans and arachnids, her resistance to control by Alvy’s efforts to mold her into someone apparently somber (which for him means preoccupied with mortality). In the beginning, the character may look like an strange pick to receive acclaim; she’s the romantic lead in a film told from a male perspective, and the main pair’s journey doesn’t lead to sufficient transformation to suit each other. But Annie evolves, in aspects clear and mysterious. She simply fails to turn into a more compatible mate for her co-star. Numerous follow-up films stole the superficial stuff – anxious quirks, eccentric styles – without quite emulating her core self-reliance.

Lasting Influence and Later Roles

Perhaps Keaton felt cautious of that trend. Following her collaboration with Allen concluded, she took a break from rom-coms; Baby Boom is practically her single outing from the whole decade of the eighties. But during her absence, the film Annie Hall, the character perhaps moreso than the unconventional story, served as a blueprint for the style. Meg Ryan, for example, credits much of her love story success to Keaton’s skill to portray intelligence and flightiness together. This made Keaton seem like a permanent rom-com queen while she was in fact portraying matrimonial parts (be it joyfully, as in Father of the Bride, or less so, as in that ensemble comedy) and/or parental figures (see The Family Stone or that mother-daughter story) than single gals falling in love. Even in her reunion with Woody Allen, they’re a long-married couple brought closer together by funny detective work – and she slips into that role easily, beautifully.

But Keaton did have a further love story triumph in two thousand three with that Nancy Meyers movie, as a writer in love with a man who dates younger women (actor Jack Nicholson, naturally). What happened? Her final Oscar nomination, and a entire category of love stories where older women (usually played by movie stars, but still!) reclaim their love lives. Part of the reason her loss is so startling is that Keaton was still making these stories as recently as last year, a constant multiplex presence. Now fans are turning from taking that presence for granted to realizing what an enormous influence she was on the romantic comedy as it is recognized. Should it be difficult to recall present-day versions of such actresses who walk in her shoes, that’s likely since it’s uncommon for an actor of her caliber to commit herself to a style that’s frequently reduced to digital fare for a long time.

A Special Contribution

Ponder: there are ten active actresses who earned several Oscar nods. It’s unusual for a single part to begin in a rom-com, let alone half of them, as was the situation with Diane. {Because her