The American actress Diane Keaton, who died at the age of 79, was an icon of style, but also of character. It challenged the limits and breadth of what women could play and be, especially in the new wave of American cinema of the 1970s and 1980s.
Keaton was famous for her portrayal of the title character in Woody Allen’s satirical romantic comedy Annie Hall (1977). Her Annie could have been the love child of Katharine Hepburn and Charlie Chaplin.
She had Hepburn’s strength, intelligence, updo, gender-nonconforming pants and tie; Chaplin’s comedy, mischief and charm; and the idiosyncrasies of both. Annie, like many of Keaton’s other characters, was eccentric but intelligent, troubled and flawed, sweet but sensual. And always endearing and complex.
Keaton won an Oscar for Annie. She physically dwarfed Allen despite being the same height (according to Allen), and her character’s awkward flirtatiousness, delight, and curiosity made up for his neurosis. Allen cast Keaton in eight of his films and described her as, “with the exception of Judy Holliday,” “the best comedian we have ever seen.”
Keaton is best known as a comedian (or, as film critic Peter Bradshaw puts it, “a comic performer of ethereal, self-aware genius”). But he also had an impressive track record in drama.
Five years before Annie Hall, Keaton played Kay, an outsider marrying into a mafia family in Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Godfather” (1972). He appeared in the entire trilogy alongside Al Pacino.
Speaking to the American network NPR in 2017, he explained that he drew on his experience as a young man on the filming set of “The Godfather,” deeply dominated by men, to understand Kay’s experience in the mafia world, also male.
The same year as Annie Hall, Keaton played Theresa Dunn in the much darker film Finding Mr. Goodbar. Theresa leads a double life: by day she is a Catholic teacher and by night she roams bars and clubs in search of casual, sometimes rough, sex.
Adapted from Judith Rossner’s 1975 novel, the film was criticized for its crude sensationalism, but Keaton’s depiction of Theresa’s desire was widely admired. “Sight and Sound,” for example, called her performance impressive, “mainly because her strength and sensitivity as an actress seem to operate outside the underdeveloped character she plays.”
Keaton also starred alongside Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson in Reds (1981), Beatty’s epic drama that explored political and personal commitment in the context of journalists’ involvement in the Russian Revolution. Keaton played activist Louise Bryant, who leaves her family to join the political struggle, and, let’s be honest, handsome journalist Jack Reed (Beatty).
New York Times journalist Alissa Wilkinson wrote of the performance: “We may not all be Reed, the charismatic idealist giving speeches, but we are Bryant, trying to hold on to the fast-moving story and discovering who we are in it.”
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Keaton’s later career
It’s an indictment of Hollywood that, as Keaton aged, his roles and films became more conventional and less challenging than some of his earlier work. That said, he admitted that his own confidence affected his career, mistakenly believing that “without a great man to write and direct for me,” he was “mediocre.”
Despite this, she found and created roles that continued to challenge expectations about women’s behavior, and made a series of successful collaborations with director Nancy Meyers.
In 1987’s “Baby Boom,” co-written by Meyers, Keaton played a career-minded businesswoman who inherits a baby that disrupts her life. Not only does she overcome him little by little, but she finally achieves the triplet: launching her career, keeping the baby and conquering the heartthrob Sam Shepard.
Keaton also starred in another story of triumphant mainstream feminism, Meyers’ romantic comedy-drama, “Something’s Gotta Give” (2003). Turning the tables on sexist stereotypes, Keaton’s successful character, the playwright, “tames” the playboy Nicholson, while attracting the much younger Keanu Reeves.
It seems that Hollywood couldn’t imagine Keaton’s initial excitement in an older woman’s body. But she kept doing what she could from these more tame and often liberal feminist comedy-dramas, which sought gender equality but never questioned fundamentally sexist structures.
Keaton’s legacy lives on. Some of the most influential American filmmakers and television broadcasters of the 21st century sought to take up the example of her complex characterizations of intelligent, clumsy and unconventional femininity, such as Lena Dunham and Greta Gerwig. And we will always have Diane Keaton’s catalog to remind us of the strange, touching and funny love child of Hepburn and Chaplin.
*Jen Harvey is Professor of Contemporary Theater and Performance, Queen Mary University of London.
This text was originally published in The Conversation
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