Diane Keaton Was a Genre Unto Herself

By the time I reached the fourth grade, Diane Keaton had already cemented herself as my preferred romantic heroine. Snow White and The Sound of Music’s Maria von Trapp paled in comparison to Erica Barry, the 50-something divorced playwright at the center of Nancy Meyers’s Something’s Gotta Give (2003)—coincidentally, one of the four DVDs my now 80-year-old grammy owned in the pre-streaming era.

Even in my prepubescent state (or perhaps because of it), something about Keaton’s version of falling in love in the movies resonated. Maybe it was the way she so openly resented Jack Nicholson’s aging playboy, Harry. While laid up in her Hamptons home after a heart attack, Harry asks Erica, “What’s with the turtlenecks?” She curtly replies: “I like ’em. I’ve always liked ’em, and I’m just a turtleneck kind of gal,” flippantly waving her hands in a way that’s always stuck with me. He then wants to know if she ever gets hot—and all that implies. “No,” Keaton’s character snaps, dismissively adding, “Not lately.” But there is also a hint of possibility—something Erica allows herself to express in the play she’s writing, but not the life she’s living.

Later in the film, the shedding of that same article of clothing signifies Erica’s sexual reawakening. “Cut it off,” she tells Harry, handing him a pair of scissors so he can slice open the beige turtleneck from navel to neck. With each inch of skin revealed, she breathes a little easier. “Erica, you are a woman to love,” Nicholson’s character rasps. And so was the woman who played her. “Diane Keaton, arguably the most covered up person in the history of clothes, is also a transparent woman,” as Meryl Streep once put it. “There’s nobody who stands more exposed, more undefended, and just willing to show herself inside and out than Diane.”

From that turtleneck-shedding onward, I couldn’t wait to become a wise older lady, swaddled in cashmere and typing away in my sprawling Hamptons home. I longed to be a woman to love—and few lived out that premise like Keaton, who died on Saturday at age 79. She was the soulful center of gravity in dozens of films, earning Oscar nods across four different decades—starting with a best-actress win for Annie Hall in 1978, which was followed by nominations for Reds in 1982, Marvin’s Room in 1997, and, finally, Something’s Gotta Give in 2004.

Without falling into the “manic pixie dream girl” trope that has plagued many a starlet, Keaton infused everything she did with her warm brand of chaos, grinning from beneath a wide-brimmed hat, clinking cubes of ice in a glass of red wine, eternally accessible yet wholly original. “Nobody else working in movies today can make her own misery such a source of delight or make the spectacle of utter embarrassment look like a higher form of dignity,” A.O. Scott wrote in his New York Times review of Something’s Gotta Give. “Erica is by turns prickly, indecisive, uptight, vulnerable, self-assured, and skittish: traits Ms. Keaton blends into a performance that is at once entirely coherent and dizzyingly unpredictable.”

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Keaton chalked her singular nature up to “insecurity in conjunction with ambition,” as she said while answering Vanity Fair’s Proust Questionnaire. Playing Kay Adams, the long-suffering wife of Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather trilogy, “I always felt…that I was an outsider,” Keaton told the New York Daily News in 1993. “Like I was the representative of the WASP world who was tight, cold, and creepy. And I never understood why he cast me. Ever. I always thought people cast me because I’m—let’s face it—quirky. That was my operation. Directors would say, ‘We probably won’t give it to Diane. She’s a little too nutty.’ That’s the word they used to use. Nutty. And I understood that. Eccentric.” But it’s the utter absence of that energy in the final moments of the first Godfather, which ends with a close-up of Keaton’s haunted face as she sees the mob boss her husband has become, that’s lingered with audiences ever since.

Keaton also had an off-screen romance with Pacino, as she did with fellow collaborators Woody Allen, with whom she made eight films, and Warren Beatty, who directed Reds (1981) and costarred alongside Keaton. Her partnership with Meyers began with Baby Boom (1987)—her first of four features with the writer-director, including 1991’s Father of the Bride and its immediate sequel. She proved to be a muse to many, but was always master of her own domain. “Diane Keaton is a plot. She is an unpredictable, mysterious, suspenseful, constantly surprising, sometimes comedic, sometimes tragic, always engaging plot,” Beatty said. “The woman is a story.”

For Keaton, that often meant playing women on the verge. In Baby Boom, she stars as a corporate yuppie who inherits a baby after the death of a distant family member, then uproots her single city life to start a baby-food business in Vermont. Before getting romanced by Sam Shepard’s small-town veterinarian, Keaton’s character memorably breaks down to a stranger about needing both running water from a faucet and sex, spiraling in an otherwise picturesque locale. Keaton further perfected the art of being unglued onscreen in The First Wives Club (1996), which sees her crash out upon learning that her husband (Stephen Collins) is leaving her for their shared therapist (Marcia Gay Harden). Rest assured, she pulls it together enough to playfully bite her lip during a rousing performance of “You Don’t Own Me,” flanked by costars (and fellow first wives) Goldie Hawn and Bette Midler.

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Keaton’s finesse in portraying characters dealing with romantic complications served her in later roles—particularly as well-meaning but overbearing mothers in The Family Stone (2005) and Because I Said So (2007). The anxiety over her onscreen children’s love lives fuels both performances and elevates the films themselves. There is plenty of flailing and shrieking and meddling in menswear-inspired getups. But both movies also harness Keaton’s ability to emote with very little. In Because I Said So, Keaton’s Daphne flirts with the father of her daughter’s boyfriend by merely writing messages on a notepad. And The Family Stone’s most heartbreaking moment comes courtesy of a wordless scene involving Keaton, her onscreen husband (Craig T. Nelson), and a stirring rendition of Judy Garland’s “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”

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But even that simplicity is deceiving. “She’s witty and she’s clever and she’s seemingly scattered in a way. But that does not actually speak to the enormous intelligence and seriousness that she brings to her work. It’s not an accident, her work,” Keaton’s Family Stone costar Sarah Jessica Parker told Vulture in 2018. “It’s not easy. It’s thoughtful and considered.”

Like all of her best characters, Keaton had a funny way of peeling back her layers—effortlessly blending genres and emotions in one scene, sometimes even in one line of dialogue. She defied categorization and was never defined by a single collaboration. Above all, Keaton mirrored back to us something true about the frenzied nature of life—that searching feeling that made a Midwestern kid watching movies on her grammy’s grainy TV feel connected to a coastal 50-something surviving her first big heartbreak.

“We all search for that someone who really gets us, right? Well, with Diane, I believe we mutually had that,” Meyers wrote in her emotional Instagram tribute to Keaton on Monday. “I always felt she really got me so writing for her made me better because I felt so secure in her hands.” Acknowledging that many auteurs felt understood by the actor, Meyers added: “She goes deep. And I know those who have worked with her know what I know… she made everything better.”