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Many great performers have appeared in rom-coms. Usually, should they desire to win an Oscar, they must turn for dramatic parts. Diane Keaton, whose recent passing occurred, charted a different course and executed it with seamless ease. Her initial breakout part was in The Godfather, as dramatic an cinematic masterpiece as ever created. Yet in the same year, she revisited the character of Linda, the love interest of a geeky protagonist, in a film adaptation of the stage play Play It Again, Sam. She persistently switched heavy films with romantic comedies across the seventies, and it was the latter that earned her the Academy Award for outstanding actress, altering the genre for good.

The Award-Winning Performance

That Oscar was for the film Annie Hall, co-written and directed by 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 throughout her life; in interviews, Keaton had characterized Annie as a perfect image of herself, from Allen’s perspective. It would be easy, then, to believe her portrayal required little effort. But there’s too much range in Keaton’s work, from her Godfather role and her funny films with Allen and inside Annie Hall alone, to dismiss her facility with rom-coms as merely exuding appeal – even if she was, of course, tremendously charming.

A Transition in Style

Annie Hall famously served as Allen’s shift between broader, joke-heavy films and a more naturalistic style. As such, it has plenty of gags, imaginative scenes, and a freewheeling patchwork of a love story recollection mixed with painful truths into a ill-fated romance. In a similar vein, Diane, led an evolution in U.S. romantic comedies, portraying neither the fast-talking screwball type or the sexy scatterbrain common in the fifties. Instead, she mixes and matches aspects of both to invent a novel style that still reads as oddly contemporary, halting her assertiveness with her own false-start hesitations.

Watch, for example the scene where Annie and Alvy Singer first connect after a tennis game, stumbling through reciprocal offers for a car trip (although only just one drives). The dialogue is quick, but meanders unexpectedly, with Keaton navigating her nervousness before winding up in a cul-de-sac of “la di da”, a expression that captures her quirky unease. The movie physicalizes that sensibility in the following sequence, as she engages in casual chat while driving recklessly through city avenues. Afterward, she composes herself performing the song in a nightclub.

Complexity and Freedom

These are not instances of Annie being unstable. During the entire story, there’s a complexity to her gentle eccentricity – her post-hippie openness to experiment with substances, her fear of crustaceans and arachnids, her resistance to control by Alvy’s attempts to turn her into someone apparently somber (in his view, that signifies death-obsessed). In the beginning, Annie might seem like an unusual choice to earn an award; she plays the female lead in a movie seen from a man’s point of view, and the protagonists’ trajectory doesn’t lead to either changing enough to make it work. Yet Annie does change, in manners visible and hidden. She just doesn’t become a more suitable partner for Alvy. Many subsequent love stories stole the superficial stuff – anxious quirks, eccentric styles – not fully copying her core self-reliance.

Lasting Influence and Later Roles

Possibly she grew hesitant of that pattern. After her working relationship with Allen concluded, she paused her lighthearted roles; Baby Boom is essentially her sole entry from the complete 1980s period. But during her absence, the character Annie, the persona even more than the loosely structured movie, served as a blueprint for the category. Actress Meg Ryan, for example, is largely indebted for her comedic roles to Keaton’s skill to embody brains and whimsy at once. This made Keaton seem like a permanent rom-com queen while she was in fact portraying married characters (if contentedly, as in Father of the Bride, or less so, as in that ensemble comedy) and/or parental figures (see that Christmas movie or Because I Said So) than independent ladies in love. Even during her return with the director, they’re a established married pair united more deeply by humorous investigations – and she eases into the part effortlessly, gracefully.

Yet Diane experienced a further love story triumph in the year 2003 with the film Something’s Gotta Give, as a writer in love with a man who dates younger women (Jack Nicholson, naturally). The result? One more Oscar recognition, and a whole subgenre of romances where older women (usually played by movie stars, but still!) take charge of their destinies. A key element her loss is so startling is that she kept producing such films up until recently, a constant multiplex presence. Now audiences will be pivoting from taking that presence for granted to grasping the significant effect she was on the romantic comedy as it exists today. Should it be difficult to recall contemporary counterparts of those earlier stars who walk in her shoes, that’s likely since it’s uncommon for an actor of her caliber to commit herself to a category that’s mostly been streaming fodder for a long time.

A Unique Legacy

Ponder: there are ten active actresses who earned several Oscar nods. It’s rare for one of those roles to start in a light love story, let alone half of them, as was the example of Keaton. {Because her