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Plenty of accomplished female actors have starred in rom-coms. Typically, if they want to win an Oscar, they need to shift for more serious roles. Diane Keaton, who died unexpectedly, charted a different course and pulled it off with disarmingly natural. Her first major film role was in the classic The Godfather, as weighty an cinematic masterpiece as ever created. But that same year, she reprised the part of Linda, the love interest of a geeky protagonist, in a cinematic take of Broadway’s Play It Again, Sam. She persistently switched serious dramas with romantic comedies across the seventies, and the lighter fare that earned her the Academy Award for outstanding actress, changing the genre permanently.

The Award-Winning Performance

The Oscar statuette was for the film Annie Hall, helmed and co-scripted by Woody Allen, with Keaton as the title character, one half of the movie’s fractured love story. Woody and Diane were once romantically involved before production, and continued as pals throughout her life; when speaking publicly, Keaton portrayed Annie as an idealized version of herself, from Allen’s perspective. It would be easy, then, to believe her portrayal involves doing what came naturally. Yet her breadth in Keaton’s work, both between her Godfather performance and her funny films with Allen and within Annie Hall itself, to discount her skill with rom-coms as just being charming – though she was, of course, highly charismatic.

A Transition in Style

Annie Hall famously served as the director’s evolution between broader, joke-heavy films and a realistic approach. Therefore, it has lots of humor, fantasy sequences, and a freewheeling patchwork of a relationship memoir mixed with painful truths into a ill-fated romance. In a similar vein, Diane, oversaw a change in U.S. romantic comedies, embodying neither the screwball-era speed-talker or the glamorous airhead common in the fifties. Rather, she mixes and matches elements from each to create something entirely new that feels modern even now, halting her assertiveness with nervous pauses.

Watch, for example the moment when Annie and Alvy first connect after a match of tennis, fumbling over ping-ponging invitations for a ride (despite the fact that only a single one owns a vehicle). The banter is fast, but meanders unexpectedly, with Keaton navigating her own discomfort before ending up stuck of that famous phrase, a words that embody her quirky unease. The film manifests that sensibility in the subsequent moment, as she makes blasé small talk while navigating wildly through New York roads. Afterward, she composes herself singing It Had to Be You in a club venue.

Depth and Autonomy

These are not instances of Annie acting erratic. Throughout the movie, there’s a complexity to her gentle eccentricity – her post-hippie openness to sample narcotics, her panic over lobsters and spiders, her refusal to be manipulated by Alvy’s attempts to shape her into someone outwardly grave (which for him means focused on dying). At first, Annie could appear like an unusual choice to earn an award; she’s the romantic lead in a story filtered through a man’s eyes, and the main pair’s journey fails to result in either changing enough 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. Plenty of later rom-coms took the obvious elements – anxious quirks, quirky fashions – failing to replicate her core self-reliance.

Lasting Influence and Later Roles

Possibly she grew hesitant of that tendency. Post her professional partnership with Allen ended, she paused her lighthearted roles; her movie Baby Boom is practically her single outing from the entirety of the 1980s. Yet while she was gone, Annie Hall, the character perhaps moreso than the loosely structured movie, became a model for the style. Meg Ryan, for example, credits much of her love story success to Keaton’s skill to play smart and flibbertigibbet simultaneously. This rendered Keaton like a everlasting comedy royalty while she was in fact portraying more wives (be it joyfully, as in the movie Father of the Bride, or less so, as in the film The First Wives Club) and/or parental figures (see that Christmas movie or Because I Said So) than single gals falling in love. Even in her comeback with Allen, they’re a long-married couple brought closer together by humorous investigations – and she eases into the part effortlessly, gracefully.

However, Keaton also enjoyed another major rom-com hit in the year 2003 with Something’s Gotta Give, as a playwright in love with a man who dates younger women (the star Jack Nicholson, naturally). What happened? Her last Academy Award nod, and a whole subgenre of romances where mature females (typically acted by celebrities, but still!) take charge of their destinies. A key element her death seems like such a shock is that Keaton was still making these stories up until recently, a regular cinema fixture. Now audiences will be pivoting from taking that presence for granted to understanding the huge impact she was on the romantic comedy as it exists today. Should it be difficult to recall present-day versions of those earlier stars who similarly follow in Keaton’s footsteps, the reason may be it’s seldom for a star of her caliber to commit herself to a genre that’s often just online content for a recent period.

An Exceptional Impact

Reflect: there are ten active actresses who have been nominated multiple times. It’s uncommon for any performance to originate in a romantic comedy, let alone half of them, as was the situation with Diane. {Because her