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Plenty of great performers have appeared in rom-coms. Typically, when aiming to earn an Academy Award, they have to reach for weightier characters. The late Diane Keaton, who passed away recently, took an opposite path and made it look seamless ease. Her debut significant performance was in the classic The Godfather, about as serious an cinematic masterpiece as ever created. Yet in the same year, she returned to the role 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 regularly juggled heavy films with romantic comedies during the 1970s, and the comedies that earned her the Academy Award for outstanding actress, changing the genre permanently.

The Academy Award Part

The Oscar statuette was for the film Annie Hall, co-written and directed by Allen, with Keaton in the lead role, one half of the movie’s fractured love story. The director and star were once romantically involved before production, and continued as pals for the rest of her life; during conversations, Keaton portrayed Annie as a perfect image of herself, from Allen’s perspective. It would be easy, then, to assume Keaton’s performance involves doing what came naturally. But there’s too much range in her performances, contrasting her dramatic part and her comedic collaborations and within Annie Hall itself, to underestimate her talent with funny romances as simply turning on the charm – even if she was, of course, tremendously charming.

Evolving Comedy

The film famously functioned as the director’s evolution between more gag-based broad comedies and a authentic manner. Therefore, it has numerous jokes, fantasy sequences, and a improvised tapestry of a relationship memoir alongside sharp observations into a ill-fated romance. Keaton, similarly, oversaw a change in American rom-coms, portraying neither the rapid-fire comic lead or the sexy scatterbrain common in the fifties. On the contrary, she fuses and merges traits from both to create something entirely new that seems current today, halting her assertiveness with uncertain moments.

Watch, for example the sequence with the couple initially hit it off after a game on the courts, awkwardly exchanging proposals for a car trip (despite the fact that only one of them has a car). The exchange is rapid, but zig-zags around unpredictably, with Keaton navigating her own discomfort before concluding with of “la di da”, a phrase that encapsulates her nervous whimsy. The movie physicalizes that tone in the subsequent moment, as she engages in casual chat while navigating wildly through city avenues. Afterward, she composes herself singing It Had to Be You in a club venue.

Depth and Autonomy

This is not evidence of Annie acting erratic. Throughout the movie, there’s a dimensionality to her gentle eccentricity – her hippie-hangover willingness to experiment with substances, her fear of crustaceans and arachnids, her refusal to be manipulated by Alvy’s efforts to turn her into someone apparently somber (in his view, that signifies death-obsessed). In the beginning, Annie could appear like an strange pick to earn an award; she’s the romantic lead in a story filtered through a man’s eyes, and the protagonists’ trajectory doesn’t lead to either changing enough accommodate the other. Yet Annie does change, in ways both observable and unknowable. She simply fails to turn into a more compatible mate for her co-star. Many subsequent love stories stole the superficial stuff – nervous habits, eccentric styles – without quite emulating Annie’s ultimate independence.

Ongoing Legacy and Senior Characters

Perhaps Keaton felt cautious of that tendency. Following her collaboration with Allen ended, she paused her lighthearted roles; her movie Baby Boom is essentially her sole entry from the whole decade of the eighties. However, in her hiatus, the character Annie, the persona even more than the unconventional story, emerged as a template for the category. Star Meg Ryan, for example, credits much of her love story success to Keaton’s skill to embody brains and whimsy at once. This made Keaton seem like a everlasting comedy royalty even as she was actually playing matrimonial parts (whether happily, as in the movie Father of the Bride, or less so, as in that ensemble comedy) and/or parental figures (see the holiday film The Family Stone or the comedy Because I Said So) than independent ladies in love. Even in her comeback with the director, they’re a established married pair united more deeply by comic amateur sleuthing – 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 playwright in love with a older playboy (the star Jack Nicholson, naturally). The result? One more Oscar recognition, and a complete niche of romantic tales where mature females (often portrayed by famous faces, but still!) reassert their romantic and/or social agency. Part of the reason her passing feels so sudden is that Keaton was still making such films just last year, a frequent big-screen star. Now audiences will be pivoting from taking that presence for granted to realizing what an enormous influence she was on the funny romance as it is recognized. If it’s harder to think of modern equivalents of such actresses who similarly follow in Keaton’s footsteps, that’s likely since it’s seldom for a star of Keaton’s skill to dedicate herself to a category that’s mostly been streaming fodder for a recent period.

An Exceptional Impact

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