Diane Keaton’s bereaved family has revealed the cause of her death at age 79.
The Annie Hall star died of pneumonia on Oct. 11, her family said in a statement to PEOPLE magazine.
“The Keaton family are very grateful for the extraordinary messages of love and support they have received these past few days on behalf of their beloved Diane, who passed away from pneumonia on October 11,” they said.
“She loved her animals and she was steadfast in her support of the unhoused community, so any donations in her memory to a local food bank or an animal shelter would be a wonderful and much appreciated tribute to her,” they added.
Keaton is survived by her daughter Dexter, 29, and Duke, 25, whom she adopted when she was in her 50s. Though she never married—telling PEOPLE in 2019 that she was always an “oddball”—she once described motherhood as “an urge I couldn’t resist… so I plunged in.”
The Oscar-winning actress was born as Diane Hall in Los Angeles in 1946 to a civil engineer father and a stay-at-home mother. She was the oldest of four kids.
On the day of Keaton’s death, a source told the magazine that her health “declined very suddenly, which was heartbreaking for everyone who loved her.”
“In her final months, she was surrounded only by her closest family, who chose to keep things very private. Even longtime friends weren’t fully aware of what was happening,” the source told PEOPLE.
Keaton’s big break came in 1969 when she was cast in Woody Allen’s Broadway show Play It Again, Sam, which earned her a Tony nomination. She had a decades-long professional relationship with Allen, who became a controversial figure in the wake of a sexual abuse allegation.
In 1972, Keaton starred in Francis Ford Coppola’s hit The Godfather. She would later confess that she had never read the books.
“I think the kindest thing that someone’s ever done for me… is that I got cast to be in The Godfather and I didn’t even read it. I didn’t know a single thing,” she told PEOPLE in 2022. “I just was going around auditioning. I think that was amazing for me.”
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