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Many accomplished female actors have appeared in rom-coms. Usually, when aiming to win an Oscar, they need to shift for weightier characters. Diane Keaton, whose recent passing occurred, took an opposite path and executed it with seamless ease. Her debut significant performance was in the classic The Godfather, as weighty an American masterpiece as has ever been made. Yet in the same year, she returned to the role of the character Linda, the focus of an awkward lead’s admiration, in a movie version of the theatrical production Play It Again, Sam. She regularly juggled intense dramas with lighthearted romances during the 1970s, and the lighter fare that secured her the Oscar for leading actress, transforming the category forever.

The Award-Winning Performance

The award was for Annie Hall, helmed and co-scripted by Woody Allen, with Keaton in the lead role, part of the film’s broken romance. Allen and Keaton dated previously before making the film, and continued as pals for the rest of her life; in interviews, Keaton described Annie as a dream iteration of herself, from Allen’s perspective. One could assume, then, to think her acting meant being herself. Yet her breadth in Keaton’s work, contrasting her dramatic part and her comedic collaborations and inside Annie Hall alone, to dismiss her facility with funny romances as just being charming – though she was, of course, incredibly appealing.

Shifting Genres

Annie Hall notably acted as Allen’s shift between broader, joke-heavy films and a realistic approach. Consequently, it has plenty of gags, imaginative scenes, and a improvised tapestry of a romantic memory in between some stinging insights into a ill-fated romance. Keaton, similarly, presides over a transition in American rom-coms, portraying neither the rapid-fire comic lead or the bombshell ditz common in the fifties. Rather, she fuses and merges traits from both to invent a novel style that still reads as oddly contemporary, interrupting her own boldness with uncertain moments.

Watch, for example the moment when Annie and Alvy initially hit it off after a game on the courts, stumbling through reciprocal offers for a ride (despite the fact that only just one drives). The dialogue is quick, but veers erratically, with Keaton soloing around her nervousness before concluding with of her whimsical line, a words that embody her nervous whimsy. The film manifests that sensibility in the next scene, as she has indifferent conversation while navigating wildly through New York roads. Afterward, she finds her footing singing It Had to Be You in a nightclub.

Dimensionality and Independence

These aren’t examples of Annie acting erratic. Across the film, there’s a depth to her playful craziness – her hippie-hangover willingness to experiment with substances, her fear of crustaceans and arachnids, her refusal to be manipulated by the protagonist’s tries to shape her into someone outwardly grave (in his view, that signifies preoccupied with mortality). At first, Annie might seem like an strange pick to receive acclaim; she’s the romantic lead in a movie seen from a man’s point of view, and the protagonists’ trajectory doesn’t bend toward adequate growth to make it work. Yet Annie does change, in manners visible and hidden. She simply fails to turn into a more suitable partner for the male lead. Many subsequent love stories borrowed the surface traits – neurotic hang-ups, quirky fashions – without quite emulating Annie’s ultimate independence.

Ongoing Legacy and Senior Characters

Possibly she grew hesitant of that pattern. Post her professional partnership with Allen concluded, she paused her lighthearted roles; Baby Boom is practically her single outing from the entirety of the 1980s. But during her absence, the film Annie Hall, the role possibly more 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 embody brains and whimsy at once. This rendered Keaton like a permanent rom-com queen even as she was actually playing married characters (if contentedly, as in the movie Father of the Bride, or more strained, as in the film 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 in her comeback with Woody Allen, they’re a long-married couple brought closer together by humorous investigations – and she fits the character smoothly, wonderfully.

However, Keaton also enjoyed an additional romantic comedy success in two thousand three with that Nancy Meyers movie, as a writer in love with a older playboy (Jack Nicholson, naturally). What happened? Her final Oscar nomination, and a whole subgenre of romantic tales where mature females (usually played by movie stars, but still!) reclaim their love lives. Part of the reason her passing feels so sudden is that Keaton was still making these stories as recently as last year, a constant multiplex presence. Today viewers must shift from assuming her availability to grasping the significant effect she was on the romantic comedy as we know it. If it’s harder to think of contemporary counterparts of such actresses who emulate her path, that’s probably because it’s rare for a performer of Keaton’s skill to commit herself to a category that’s frequently reduced to digital fare for a recent period.

A Special Contribution

Ponder: there are a dozen performing women who earned several Oscar nods. It’s uncommon for any performance to originate in a romantic comedy, not to mention multiple, as was the case for Keaton. {Because her