Diane Keaton, who has died in Los Angeles at the age of 79, was the sort of actor fans felt they knew personally. This is no slight on her versatility. She worked through a range of character types in a career that lasted close to 60 years. She was Michael Corleone’s misused, conspicuously non-Sicilian wife in the Godfather trilogy. She played Louise Bryant, ground-breaking US journalist and activist, opposite Warren Beatty in Reds from 1981. But she was never able to fully escape association with the titular charmer in Woody Allen’s still irresistible Annie Hall from 1977. No wonder. Allen, who first dated Keaton while appearing with her in the Broadway production of Play it Again, Sam in 1969, named the character for her – she was born as Diane Hall – and mapped some of Keaton’s traits onto the fictionalised Annie.
“Annie Hall was everything,” she told me in 2017. “Where would I be without it? Where would I be without Woody? I wouldn’t be here.” She worked closely with costume designer Ruth Morley to produce an oversized boho look – huge ties, baggy pants – that remains a staple of urban fashion to this day. Keaton accepted that the charming, but conversationally uncertain, character was a variation on her own persona. She won an Oscar for the role and remained a much-loved presence ever after.
For all the later association with New York, she was born a southern Californian and retained the laid-back attitude associated with that locale. Raised in middle-class Orange County, she performed at school, eventually making her way to Manhattan and acting classes at the Neighbourhood Playhouse. In 1968 she secured a role as tribe member in the hippie musical Hair. Even now, that show is chiefly remembered for the nakedness of its cast. “I did not take my clothes off,” she told me. “I didn’t need to. It was not worth it. But that was very strange. Then I auditioned for Woody. I didn’t know how I got that. I didn’t understand. Why me?”
She and Allen were romantically attached for only a brief period, but the professional association lasted for decades after her turn in the theatrical version of Play it Again, Sam. Keaton played it straight in the director’s Bergmanesque Interiors from 1978. She was a flintier version of the Annie type in Manhattan from 1980. As late as 1993, when Mia Farrow, Allen’s then recently estranged partner, departed Manhattan Murder Mystery, Keaton stepped up to take the part.
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Many fans, with Annie Hall in their heads, saw her role in the Godfather films as uncharacteristic, but Keaton was more surprised at her comic success than at landing the role in Francis Ford Coppola’s epic. “I still don’t know how I got Play it Again, Sam. But I do understand The Godfather,” she said. “I was not quite fully developed. And that woman didn’t have a voice. She was lost in that world. She couldn’t stick up for herself. So maybe I made sense.”
Maybe so. But she remained most associated with an intelligent strain of all-American Wasp comedy. One of the key scenes in Annie Hall – lost on most overseas viewers – has her daring to order “pastrami on white bread with mayonnaise, tomatoes and lettuce” in a famous Jewish deli.
Yet there was rarely any sense of satirical bite in her performances. Keaton almost always encouraged empathy from audiences. Who would not warm to the hassled matriarch in the 1991 remake of Father of the Bride or the playwright torn between Jack Nicholson and Keanu Reeves in Nancy Myers’s agreeable 2003 hit Something’s Gotta Give? There is a temptation to class her with earlier geniuses in the field of romantic comedy such as Katharine Hepburn or Judy Holliday, but, in truth, nobody had an energy anything like hers. The sappy grin. The eyeroll. The poorly concealed intelligence. That energy aged gracefully as the actor moved triumphantly through the decades. One could hardly imagine a more delightful pairing than her opposite Brendan Gleeson’s eccentric homeless person in Hampstead from 2017.
She seems to have remained on good terms with all of her famous exes: Allen, Al Pacino, Warren Beatty. No doubt she, like all of us, had her enemies, but she managed to convey an admirable calm to the outside world. “Just be realistic. Right? I think that’s the thing. Right?” she said. And she never married. “No, no. Never close,” she told me. I suggested she was from a particular generation – the one that came of age in the 1960s – that, for a while at least, felt that institution was going out of fashion, but she wasn’t quite buying that theory. “Maybe oddballs didn’t get married. Ha ha!” she retorted.
That sentence does sit comfortably in an assessment of a career unlike any other. Nobody else generated such affection with such an attractive school of eccentricity. She was a writer, producer and – one for the trivia fans – she directed an episode of the original Twin Peaks. Keaton is survived by the two children she adopted in her fifties. That seemed a characteristically surprising and characteristically likeable decision.
“It was late,” she admitted in 2017. “I had broken up with somebody and I thought: that was my last go round. What are you going to do with your life?”
She did plenty.
