The Astonishing Versatility of Diane Keaton

When an actor we’ve always loved dies, the first thing we think is, “This is incomprehensible.” Actors, for those of us who have measured our lives in movies, aren’t just performers who have given us joy. They’re people who have walked along with us year by year; we match stride with them without even being aware of it. We measure the changes in them—the laugh lines that weren’t there the year before, the slightly rounded tummy that most women are forced to reckon with sometime in their fifties—more observantly than we register similar shifts in ourselves. To watch ourselves age is not much fun, but to watch them age is the privilege of a lifetime. That’s how it was with Diane Keaton, who died on Oct. 11 at age 79. Keaton wasn’t just a gifted performer; she also proved to be a fine director. She took wonderful photographs. She could sing, in a fine, clear voice with the charm of a robin’s warble. She adopted children in her early 50s. She never married. She always looked great, expressing radical, rapturous individuality with her clothing, her eyewear, her retro jewelry. But most significantly, she was one of the most sparkling actors of her generation, and though many people associate her mostly with the brainy doodle of a performance she gave in Annie Hall—a brilliant one—she was astonishingly versatile. She was great without ever trying to be great, a performer who took full advantage of the freedom newly afforded to actresses in the 1970s, even though it was always the men of the new Hollywood—performers like Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, one of Keaton’s great loves—who drew the loudest praise. Keaton was born in Los Angeles, but her career kicked off in New York, onstage: In 1968, she was a member of the original cast of Hair. In 1969, Woody Allen cast her in Play It Again, Sam on Broadway—this is how she and Allen met, launching a romantic and creative partnership that evolved into a lasting friendship. In 1973, she would also co-star in the movie version of that play, the same year she appeared, opposite Pacino, in The Godfather, as Michael Corleone’s wife Kay: in her relatively few scenes, she’s heartrending as a woman ready and eager to play the conventional role of wife and mother, only to be shut out of her husband’s orbit in favor of his underworld business dealings. Keaton’s career thrived in the 1980s and beyond. She’s staggering as an abandoned wife in Alan Parker’s lacerating end-of-a-marriage drama Shoot the Moon (1982), a film that seems to have been unjustly forgotten. And she’s the spiritual anchor of Warren Beatty’s sprawling 1981 Reds, as journalist and activist Louise Bryant. Keaton was involved with Beatty at the time, though her performance hardly takes a backseat to his portrayal of lefty journalist John Reed. As Bryant, she maps the shape of early feminist defiance, aflame with the determination to live her life as she chooses. There’s so much more. Through the 1990s and early 2000s, she was often the best thing about the comedies she starred in, among them Something’s Gotta Give (2003) and the otherwise rather dismal Father of the Bride movies: she appeared in two of the latter, as well as a short, 2020’s Father of the Bride 3 (ish). In 1995, she made her fiction-feature directorial debut with Unstrung Heroes, a delightful, freewheeling picture about a 12-year-old boy who’s sent to live with his oddball uncles, played by Maury Chaykin and Michael Richards. Through it all, Keaton has somehow felt like a person we knew, largely because of the role Allen wrote specially for her, the title character of Annie Hall. As Annie, the onetime girlfriend of Allen’s preternaturally neurotic comedian Alvy Singer, Keaton breezes through the movie like a gust of autumn wind—she’s as captivating and capricious as a curlicue of airborne leaves. Her timing has its origins in 1930s comedy, but also, perhaps, on some as-yet undiscovered, faraway planet: her lines spin out in woolly loops, and even if Alvy has the most cerebral quips, her comebacks always top them with their weirdo bravado. In the same year, she gave a superb performance in a far stranger—and lesser—film: In Looking for Mr. Goodbar, adapted from Judith Rossner’s best-selling novel, Keaton plays Theresa Dunn, a New York City schoolteacher who, having broken free of her repressive Catholic family, avails herself of the sexual freedom newly available to her. By day, she forges a tender bond with the deaf children she teaches; by night, she has adventurous sex with random guys she meets in bars. (One of them is a brawny but bland Richard Gere.) In the end, Teresa must be punished for her sins—Rossner’s novel was inspired by the real-life case of schoolteacher Roseann Quinn, who was stabbed to death by a random pickup, and the movie is styled as a cautionary tale about the terrible cost of women’s sexual freedom. But there’s nothing pinched or inhibited about Keaton’s performance: it’s both fiery and bracingly carnal. When her performatively altruistic social-worker boyfriend, played by William Atherton, patronizes her by suggesting she’d be happier if she settled down, she blasts him with a line like a gut punch, the kind of raw truth that so many men can barely comprehend: “I’m alone, not lonely!” This is a great performance in a lousy movie, sometimes the truest measure of an actor’s grace and skill. There’s so much more that could be said about Keaton’s gifts, but it would be a grave oversight to say goodbye to her without a few words about her style. So many women growing up in the ’60s and ’70s were raised by mothers with specific ideas about how a lady should dress and comport herself: The shoes should match the handbag. Nylons are a must with all but the most casual outfits. Never leave the house without a clean hanky. In the face of that, Keaton’s off- and sometimes on-duty style represented limitless possibilities, and a previously incomprehensible kind of freedom. Today, nearly everyone is hip to the power of thrifting, but in the ’70s, mixing and matching used clothes made you part of a secret society, and Keaton was our clubhouse president. She turned slouchy tweed jackets into totems of offhanded glamor. She knew the power of a scarf, worn long and draped under a blazer or tied in a floppy bow under a high-buttoned collar. She wore socks with high heels. There are lots of great actresses who dress beautifully, but in the modern day, nearly all of them use stylists. They may know what they like—when they’re presented with gowns and outfits, they’re perfectly equipped to say yes or no—but you rarely get the sense that what they’re wearing is a true expression of who they are. To watch Keaton’s style evolve, especially as she aged, was pleasure in itself: She knew that a belt perched high would lend even more watchtower stature to her already long legs. After being treated for skin cancer, she wore turtlenecks as protection from the sun, but she also understood how that soft bit of stretchy fabric could frame your face like a lily. She always dressed beautifully and expressively, but nothing ever felt overthought or fussed over. Nonchalant and focused at once: that was Keaton, inviting us along on a path of adventurous curves and turns, one whose length we would never think to measure until we looked back and saw how far we’d come.