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Plenty of accomplished actresses have performed in romantic comedies. Ordinarily, when aiming to receive Oscar recognition, they have to reach for weightier characters. The late Diane Keaton, who passed away recently, took an opposite path and pulled it off with seamless ease. Her debut significant performance was in The Godfather, about as serious an cinematic masterpiece 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 movie version of the theatrical production Play It Again, Sam. She continued to alternate intense dramas with funny love stories throughout the ’70s, and the comedies that secured her the Oscar for best actress, transforming the category forever.

The Oscar-Winning Role

That Oscar was for the film Annie Hall, helmed and co-scripted by Woody Allen, with Keaton in the lead role, part of the film’s broken romance. Woody and Diane dated previously before making the film, and remained close friends throughout her life; in interviews, Keaton portrayed Annie as an idealized version of herself, as seen by Allen. One could assume, then, to believe her portrayal required little effort. But there’s too much range in Keaton’s work, contrasting her dramatic part and her funny films with Allen and throughout that very movie, to underestimate her talent with rom-coms as merely exuding appeal – even if she was, of course, highly charismatic.

Shifting Genres

The film famously functioned as Allen’s shift between broader, joke-heavy films and a authentic manner. As such, it has numerous jokes, imaginative scenes, and a freewheeling patchwork of a romantic memory mixed with painful truths into a fated love affair. In a similar vein, Diane, oversaw a change in American rom-coms, portraying neither the screwball-era speed-talker or the sexy scatterbrain famous from the ’50s. On the contrary, she blends and combines elements from each to create something entirely new that seems current today, interrupting her own boldness with nervous pauses.

Observe, for instance the scene where Annie and Alvy Singer initially hit it off after a game on the courts, fumbling over ping-ponging invitations for a lift (although only one of them has a car). The dialogue is quick, but zig-zags around unpredictably, with Keaton maneuvering through her nervousness before concluding with of her whimsical line, a phrase that encapsulates her nervous whimsy. The film manifests that sensibility in the next scene, as she makes blasé small talk while driving recklessly through New York roads. Later, she composes herself singing It Had to Be You in a club venue.

Depth and Autonomy

These aren’t examples of Annie being unstable. During the entire story, there’s a dimensionality to her light zaniness – her post-hippie openness to experiment with substances, her fear of crustaceans and arachnids, her resistance to control by the protagonist’s tries to mold her into someone outwardly grave (which for him means death-obsessed). In the beginning, Annie might seem like an unusual choice to receive acclaim; she is the love interest in a story filtered through a man’s eyes, and the protagonists’ trajectory doesn’t bend toward 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 Alvy. Plenty of later rom-coms took the obvious elements – neurotic hang-ups, odd clothing – failing to replicate her final autonomy.

Lasting Influence and Later Roles

Possibly she grew hesitant of that trend. Following her collaboration with Woody finished, she paused her lighthearted roles; Baby Boom is really her only one from the whole decade of the eighties. However, in her hiatus, Annie Hall, the persona even more than the unconventional story, served as a blueprint for the category. Actress Meg Ryan, for example, is largely indebted for her comedic roles to Diane’s talent to play smart and flibbertigibbet simultaneously. This rendered Keaton like a everlasting comedy royalty while she was in fact portraying matrimonial parts (if contentedly, as in the movie Father of the Bride, or more strained, as in The First Wives Club) and/or mothers (see the holiday film The Family Stone or that mother-daughter story) than independent ladies in love. Even during her return with Allen, they’re a long-married couple drawn nearer by funny detective work – and she fits the character effortlessly, gracefully.

However, Keaton also enjoyed a further love story triumph in two thousand three with the film Something’s Gotta Give, as a playwright in love with a younger-dating cad (Jack Nicholson, naturally). The result? One more Oscar recognition, and a complete niche of romances where senior actresses (often portrayed by famous faces, but still!) reclaim their love lives. A key element her death seems like such a shock is that Diane continued creating such films up until recently, a regular cinema fixture. Now audiences will be pivoting from assuming her availability to understanding the huge impact she was on the romantic comedy as we know it. If it’s harder to think of present-day versions of Meg Ryan or Goldie Hawn who similarly follow in Keaton’s footsteps, the reason may be it’s uncommon for an actor of Keaton’s skill to devote herself to a category that’s mostly been streaming fodder for a long time.

An Exceptional Impact

Consider: there are 10 living female actors who earned several Oscar nods. It’s unusual for a single part to start in a light love story, not to mention multiple, as was the situation with Diane. {Because her