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Plenty of great performers have appeared in romantic comedies. Ordinarily, if they want to earn an Academy Award, they need to shift for weightier characters. Diane Keaton, who passed away recently, took an opposite path and made it look effortless grace. Her initial breakout part was in The Godfather, as weighty an film classic as has ever been made. But that same year, she returned to the role of Linda, the object of a nerdy hero’s affection, in a movie version of the theatrical production Play It Again, Sam. She persistently switched intense dramas with funny love stories across the seventies, and the lighter fare that secured her the Oscar for outstanding actress, changing the genre permanently.

The Academy Award Part

That Oscar was for the film Annie Hall, helmed and co-scripted by Woody Allen, with Keaton portraying Annie, part of the film’s broken romance. Woody and Diane had been in a romantic relationship before production, and continued as pals until her passing; when speaking publicly, Keaton described Annie as a dream iteration of herself, through Allen’s eyes. It might be simple, then, to think her acting required little effort. Yet her breadth in her performances, both between her Godfather performance and her Allen comedies and within Annie Hall itself, to underestimate her talent with rom-coms as merely exuding appeal – though she was, of course, tremendously charming.

Evolving Comedy

The film famously functioned as Allen’s transition between broader, joke-heavy films and a realistic approach. Therefore, it has plenty of gags, dreamlike moments, and a loose collage of a relationship memoir mixed with painful truths into a doomed romantic relationship. In a similar vein, Diane, presides over a transition in U.S. romantic comedies, portraying neither the screwball-era speed-talker or the glamorous airhead famous from the ’50s. On the contrary, she mixes and matches elements from each to invent a novel style that seems current today, interrupting her own boldness with nervous pauses.

Watch, for example 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 (even though only one of them has a car). The dialogue is quick, but veers erratically, with Keaton navigating her own discomfort before concluding with of her whimsical line, a phrase that encapsulates her nervous whimsy. The movie physicalizes that tone in the following sequence, as she makes blasé small talk while operating the car carelessly through New York roads. Afterward, she finds her footing performing the song in a cabaret.

Depth and Autonomy

These are not instances of the character’s unpredictability. Across the film, there’s a depth to her playful craziness – her post-hippie openness to sample narcotics, her anxiety about sea creatures and insects, her resistance to control by Alvy’s efforts to shape her into someone apparently somber (which for him means death-obsessed). In the beginning, Annie might seem like an odd character to win an Oscar; she plays the female lead in a movie seen from a man’s point of view, and the protagonists’ trajectory doesn’t bend toward either changing enough to make it work. Yet Annie does change, in aspects clear and mysterious. She merely avoids becoming a better match for Alvy. Plenty of later rom-coms stole the superficial stuff – anxious quirks, eccentric styles – failing to replicate her core self-reliance.

Ongoing Legacy and Senior Characters

Maybe Keaton was wary of that pattern. After her working relationship with Allen ended, she took a break from rom-coms; Baby Boom is practically her single outing from the entirety of the 1980s. However, in her hiatus, the film Annie Hall, the role possibly more than the loosely structured movie, emerged as a template for the genre. Actress Meg Ryan, for example, is largely indebted for her comedic roles to Keaton’s ability to play smart and flibbertigibbet simultaneously. This cast Keaton as like a everlasting comedy royalty even as she was actually playing more wives (be it joyfully, as in that family comedy, or not as much, as in the film The First Wives Club) and/or moms (see the holiday film The Family Stone or the comedy Because I Said So) than independent ladies in love. Even in her comeback with Allen, they’re a long-married couple brought closer together by funny detective work – and she eases into the part effortlessly, gracefully.

However, Keaton also enjoyed 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). The result? Her final Oscar nomination, and a whole subgenre of love stories where older women (usually played by movie stars, but still!) reassert their romantic and/or social agency. A key element her death seems like such a shock is that she kept producing those movies just last year, a constant multiplex presence. Now audiences will be pivoting from assuming her availability to understanding the huge impact she was on the funny romance as we know it. If it’s harder to think of modern equivalents of Meg Ryan or Goldie Hawn who walk in her shoes, the reason may be it’s seldom for a star of Keaton’s skill to commit herself to a category that’s frequently reduced to digital fare for a long time.

An Exceptional Impact

Reflect: there are ten active actresses who have been nominated multiple times. It’s rare for one of those roles to begin in a rom-com, especially not several, as was the case for Keaton. {Because her