Scott Gurvey's Public Offerings

I fell for Diane Keaton the minute I heard her speak that line in Annie Hall. She won the Oscar for Best Actress for her performance as the title character in Woody Allen‘s 1977 classic. Keaton’s wardrobe, her own creation, started a whole new trend of women utilizing men’s clothing that made a mark on fashion and popular culture that survives today.

The film won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Allen won for Best Director and shared with Marshall Brickman the award for Best Original Screenplay.

It is amazing how many times Keaton appears in the cast of a film on my top one hundred list. Her death, coming a month after the passing of Robert Redford, leaves a hole in the hearts of my generation of movie lovers.

In Annie Hall Keaton took what could have been a typical screwball comedy and brought it forward for a new generation. While this might be my favorite, Keaton could not be typecast and her roles across a long career demonstrated an extraordinary range. With Allen both during and after their romantic relationship she made eight films including Sleeper and Manhattan.

People tend to forget she was also a key player in Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather trilogy. Keaton made Kay Adams-Corleone, wife of Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone, his moral compass to the world outside his Mafia kingdom. She not only stands up to him. She walks away.

The same year Annie Hall was released, Keaton played a rising-star actress in Looking for Mr. Goodbar, a remarkably dark and dramatic work. In 1981, she played the journalist and Russian Revolution sympathizer Louise Bryant, starring opposite writer-director (and offscreen partner at the time) Warren Beatty Reds. The following year came Alan Parker Shoot the Moon, starring opposite Albert Finney. In a New Yorker review, Pauline Kael wrote, “Diane Keaton acts on a different plane from her previous film roles. She brings the character a full measure of dread and awareness, and does it in a special, intuitive way that’s right for screen acting. Nothing looks rehearsed, yet it’s all fully created.”

In more recent years Keaton joined Goldie Hawn and Bette Midler playing women pushed aside for younger models who turn the tables on their philandering husbands in Hugh Wilson‘s First Wives Club. She received her fourth Oscar nomination for Nancy Meyers’ romantic comedy, Something’s Gotta Give. Here she stars as a playwright who’s much more than a foil to Jack Nicholson’s smug playboy, who prides himself on dating only women under thirty.

How do you say goodbye to a legend? Her passing unexpectedly at the age of 79 brought forth a tremendous outpouring of fond remembrances from her peers and her public. It was always reassuring to wonder what role she would do next. An era in Hollywood is drawing to a close.

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