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Numerous great performers have appeared in love stories with humor. Typically, when aiming to receive Oscar recognition, they must turn for dramatic parts. The late Diane Keaton, who passed away recently, followed a reverse trajectory and made it look effortless grace. Her first major film role was in the classic The Godfather, about as serious an film classic as ever produced. Yet in the same year, she revisited the character of the character Linda, the object of a nerdy hero’s affection, in a film adaptation of Broadway’s Play It Again, Sam. She persistently switched intense dramas with lighthearted romances during the 1970s, and it was the latter that earned her the Academy Award for leading actress, changing the genre permanently.

The Oscar-Winning Role

That Oscar was for the film Annie Hall, helmed and co-scripted by Woody Allen, with Keaton portraying Annie, one half of the movie’s fractured love story. Allen and Keaton dated previously before production, and stayed good friends until her passing; when speaking publicly, Keaton described Annie as a dream iteration of herself, from Allen’s perspective. One could assume, then, to assume Keaton’s performance required little effort. But there’s too much range in her acting, both between her Godfather performance and her funny films with Allen and throughout that very movie, to dismiss her facility with rom-coms as simply turning on the charm – though she was, of course, highly charismatic.

Shifting Genres

Annie Hall notably acted as the director’s evolution between more gag-based broad comedies and a more naturalistic style. Consequently, it has numerous jokes, fantasy sequences, and a freewheeling patchwork of a relationship memoir in between some stinging insights into a fated love affair. Keaton, similarly, presides over a transition in American rom-coms, embodying neither the fast-talking screwball type or the sexy scatterbrain common in the fifties. Rather, she mixes and matches aspects of both to invent a novel style that seems current today, halting her assertiveness with nervous pauses.

Observe, for instance the scene where Annie and Alvy Singer initially bond after a tennis game, fumbling over ping-ponging invitations for a lift (despite the fact that only one of them has a car). The banter is fast, but veers erratically, with Keaton maneuvering through her own discomfort before winding up in a cul-de-sac of that famous phrase, a phrase that encapsulates her quirky unease. The movie physicalizes that tone in the next scene, as she engages in casual chat while operating the car carelessly through New York roads. Subsequently, she composes herself singing It Had to Be You in a nightclub.

Depth and Autonomy

This is not evidence of Annie being unstable. Across the film, there’s a dimensionality to her light zaniness – her hippie-hangover willingness to try drugs, her panic over lobsters and spiders, her refusal to be manipulated by the protagonist’s tries to shape her into someone more superficially serious (which for him means focused on dying). In the beginning, Annie might seem like an strange pick to win an Oscar; she is the love interest in a film told from a male perspective, and the main pair’s journey fails to result in either changing enough to suit each other. But Annie evolves, in ways both observable and unknowable. She merely avoids becoming a more compatible mate for her co-star. Plenty of later rom-coms took the obvious elements – anxious quirks, quirky fashions – without quite emulating Annie’s ultimate independence.

Lasting Influence and Later Roles

Maybe Keaton was wary of that pattern. After her working relationship with Allen ended, she stepped away from romantic comedies; the film Baby Boom is practically her single outing from the entirety of the 1980s. However, in her hiatus, Annie Hall, the character perhaps moreso than the free-form film, served as a blueprint for the category. Meg Ryan, for example, owes most of her rom-com career to Keaton’s skill to play smart and flibbertigibbet simultaneously. This rendered Keaton like a permanent rom-com queen while she was in fact portraying more wives (be it joyfully, as in Father of the Bride, or not as much, as in the film The First Wives Club) and/or moms (see The Family Stone or the comedy Because I Said So) than single gals falling in love. Even during her return with Allen, they’re a long-married couple united more deeply by funny detective work – and she fits the character effortlessly, gracefully.

However, Keaton also enjoyed a further love story triumph in 2003 with Something’s Gotta Give, as a dramatist in love with a man who dates younger women (Jack Nicholson, naturally). What happened? Her final Oscar nomination, and a whole subgenre of romances where senior actresses (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 Diane continued creating those movies as recently as last year, a regular cinema fixture. Today viewers must shift from expecting her roles to grasping the significant effect she was on the romantic comedy as it exists today. Should it be difficult to recall modern equivalents of those earlier stars who similarly follow in Keaton’s footsteps, that’s probably because it’s rare for a performer of Keaton’s skill to dedicate herself to a category that’s mostly been streaming fodder for a while now.

A Special Contribution

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