The day should not go by without one more remembrance and appreciation of Diane Keaton.
Nearly every obit rightly had Annie Hall in its headline. And why not? It was that 1977 comedy classic that delivered Keaton her one and only Oscar, defined her fashion sense that carried on for her right to the end, and is being hailed as her greatest role. Woody Allen won the first two of four career Oscars for his screenplay and direction and the film was named Best Picture. Diane Keaton was Annie Hall, or least made us believe she was. In fact her real name is Diane Hall and nickname is Annie. It gave Allen a lot of inspiration to create the role for her just eight years after she first showed up on Broadway, fully clothed of course, in the original production of Hair.
Keaton could have skated on that image, done variations, and gone on to have a successul career with that one highlight. There was so much more however, and in my opinion her true greatest role was still 26 years away, but I will get to that. In the meantime there were The Godfather movies; the daring Looking For Mr. Goodbar; the epic Reds where she played Louise Bryant, and co-starred with Warren Beatty who also directed; the raucously funny First Wives Club with Bette Midler and Goldie Hawn (but we never got that promised followup); stirring dramatic turns in Shoot The Moon with Albert Finney and Mrs. Soffel with Mel Gibson; and then her collaboration with writer/director Nancy Meyers, first forged with Meyers and Charles Shyer on the Father Of The Bride movies with Steve Martin, then Baby Boom, and finally Meyers as director and writer of 2003’s Something’s Gotta Give.
It was that movie that is the one that truly showed the full force of Keaton’s immense talents all rolled into a portrayal of a 50-something woman who seemingly has it all except romance in a society where middle aged women are basically tossed aside. Jack Nicholson was her co-star as a lecherous playboy dating her daughter, a man who would never dream of hooking up with a woman his own age, but who through circumstance suffers a heart attack in her home leading to a relationship for the ages, the older ages that is, an area Hollywood rarely touches in a mainstream movie anymore, that is unless it was with movie star royalty like Keaton and Nicholson. Keaton had it all in the wonderfully smart, sexy, and sensational romantic comedy with a performance that made me melt. Keanu Reeves was in it too as a young doctor who falls for her, and you totally believe why. She’s magnificent in it and were it not for Charlize Theron’s transformative turn in Monster that year it certainly would have delivered her a second Best Actress Oscar. I don’t have to count the ballots to know that would have been the result. As it turned out it would be the last nomination she got, and the last great part she got.
Sure there was much more after that, and Keaton never stopped working, mostly in light comedies with others in her age range, notably the Book Club movies with Jane Fonda, Candice Bergen, and Mary Steenburgen. I loved seeing that quartet and it looked like they were all having fun. Her last film, the dreadful Summer Camp was another attempt at that kind of casting but is best forgotten. Keaton even shot a pilot called Tilda in which she played a fictional version of Nikki Finke, founder of this website, but mercifully it never saw the light of day. If you look on iMDB in fact there are still numerous Keaton movies listed as in pre-production, but fate intervened.
I had heard a few months ago she wasn’t well and no longer coming out of her beloved Los Angeles dream home It was a bit of a shock as she wasn’t someone who seemed to age much at all, eternally Annie Hall, la dee da and all that.
What many people might not know is Keaton had a real unique eye behind the camera as well, directing movies like Hanging Up and TV episodes of shows like Twin Peaks, the latter something that seemed ripe for her creative sensibilities. Her first foray behind the camera though was in 1987 with the fascinating documentary, Heaven in which she interviewed mostly regular folks about their vision of the afterlife and Heaven. Now she is on that journey to the real place. Let’s hope she gets enough material for an ethereal sequel.
She also wrote a couple of memoirs, but most memorably a coffee table book in 1983 called “Still Life” that is to this day my favorite picture book ever because all the photos are posed and staged heavily air-brushed technicolored shots from Hollywood sound stages with the famous and infamous. She lets the still photographs speak for themselves, but in the forward stated her fascination with them. “For some reason when you take people out of real life and photograph them in an artificial situation, what you get is a sense that people are truly undefinable,” she wrote. “What you want is to place that undefinable quality, which is totally impossible.”
What we got from her was a shining star wholly unique, an ability to keep us watching no matter what she chose to do, and to become forever immortal as only the greats get to be.
Undefinable. That’s Diane Keaton.
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