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Plenty of talented female actors have performed in romantic comedies. Typically, when aiming to earn an Academy Award, they must turn for weightier characters. Diane Keaton, who passed away recently, charted a different course and pulled it off with effortless grace. Her debut significant performance was in the classic The Godfather, as weighty an cinematic masterpiece as ever produced. But that same year, she revisited the character of the character Linda, the focus of an awkward lead’s admiration, in a cinematic take of the stage play Play It Again, Sam. She regularly juggled heavy films with lighthearted romances during the 1970s, and it was the latter that earned her the Academy Award for outstanding actress, transforming the category forever.

The Academy Award Part

The award was for the film Annie Hall, helmed and co-scripted by Woody Allen, with Keaton in the lead role, one half of the movie’s fractured love story. The director and star had been in a romantic relationship before production, and stayed good friends for the rest of her life; during conversations, Keaton described Annie as a dream iteration of herself, as seen by Allen. It would be easy, 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 underestimate her talent with romantic comedy as just being charming – although she remained, of course, tremendously charming.

A Transition in Style

The film famously functioned as the director’s evolution between broader, joke-heavy films and a realistic approach. Consequently, it has plenty of gags, fantasy sequences, and a loose collage of a romantic memory mixed with painful truths into a ill-fated romance. Keaton, similarly, presides over a transition in U.S. romantic comedies, embodying neither the rapid-fire comic lead or the bombshell ditz famous from the ’50s. Instead, she mixes and matches aspects of both to create something entirely new that still reads as oddly contemporary, cutting her confidence short with uncertain moments.

See, as an example the sequence with the couple initially bond after a tennis game, stumbling through reciprocal offers for a ride (despite the fact that only a single one owns a vehicle). The banter is fast, but veers erratically, with Keaton soloing around her own discomfort before winding up in a cul-de-sac of that famous phrase, a phrase that encapsulates her anxious charm. The film manifests that sensibility in the following sequence, as she has indifferent conversation while navigating wildly through Manhattan streets. Afterward, she centers herself singing It Had to Be You in a cabaret.

Dimensionality and Independence

These are not instances of the character’s unpredictability. Throughout the movie, there’s a depth to her light zaniness – her post-hippie openness to try drugs, her panic over lobsters and spiders, her unwillingness to be shaped by Alvy’s efforts to mold her into someone more superficially serious (which for him means preoccupied with mortality). At first, Annie might seem like an unusual choice to win an Oscar; she’s the romantic lead in a story filtered through a man’s eyes, and the main pair’s journey doesn’t bend toward adequate growth to make it work. Yet Annie does change, in ways both observable and unknowable. She just doesn’t become a more suitable partner for the male lead. Many subsequent love stories stole the superficial stuff – neurotic hang-ups, quirky fashions – not fully copying her core self-reliance.

Lasting Influence and Later Roles

Perhaps Keaton felt cautious of that pattern. Following her collaboration with Allen concluded, she paused her lighthearted roles; the film Baby Boom is practically her single outing from the whole decade of the eighties. However, in her hiatus, the film Annie Hall, the role possibly more than the loosely structured movie, became a model for the genre. Meg Ryan, for example, credits much of her love story success to Keaton’s ability to portray intelligence and flightiness together. This made Keaton seem like a everlasting comedy royalty while she was in fact portraying more wives (whether happily, as in Father of the Bride, or more strained, as in The First Wives Club) and/or moms (see The Family Stone or Because I Said So) than unattached women finding romance. Even during her return with Allen, they’re a long-married couple united more deeply by funny detective work – and she slips into that role smoothly, wonderfully.

But Keaton did have another major rom-com hit in 2003 with the film Something’s Gotta Give, as a playwright in love with a older playboy (the star Jack Nicholson, naturally). The result? One more Oscar recognition, and a whole subgenre of romantic tales where older women (often portrayed by famous faces, but still!) reclaim their love lives. One factor her death seems like such a shock is that she kept producing such films up until recently, a constant multiplex presence. Today viewers must shift from assuming her availability to grasping the significant effect she was on the romantic comedy as it is recognized. Is it tough to imagine contemporary counterparts of those earlier stars who emulate her path, the reason may be it’s uncommon for an actor of her talent to commit herself to a style that’s frequently reduced to digital fare for a long time.

An Exceptional Impact

Reflect: there are a dozen performing women who have been nominated multiple times. It’s uncommon for any performance to start in a light love story, not to mention multiple, as was the situation with Diane. {Because her