Diane Keaton, the Academy Award-winning American actress who brought her disarming, genuine style to comedy and drama across generations and became a fashion inspiration, has died at 79. Her death was confirmed by a spokesperson, with no cause yet given.
Keaton was a quicksilver performer who was compared to classic Hollywood greats such as Carole Lombard, yet deeply attuned to vital feminist issues around romance, career, and personal independence. Her Oscar-winning 1977 performance in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall was a funny and poignant portrait of a young woman finding herself between lovers, and she put no less verve into the part of a successful divorced playwright in Nancy Meyers’ 2003 hit Something’s Gotta Give. Keaton’s unassuming persona could belie her depth and range, from playing steely activist Louise Bryant in Reds (1981) to writing best-selling memoirs about her family.
Diane Hall was born in Los Angeles on January 5, 1946, to Dorothy, a housewife, and Jack Hall, a civil engineer who worked at the Department of Water and Power. She later consistently paid tribute to her mother, a fellow creative spirit who was crowned Mrs Los Angeles and filled 85 journals of memoirs. Keaton herself gravitated to performance and moved to New York to study the Meisner Technique at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre. After her first major stage role in the Broadway musical Hair, in 1968, her film debut came in Lovers and Other Strangers (1970), which caught the eye of Francis Ford Coppola, who was casting The Godfather (1972).
As the disillusioned WASP wife of mob boss Michael Corleone (Al Pacino), Keaton immediately held her own in a heavyweight Hollywood cast. Her final look, peering through a closing door, clinches the film’s capstone scene as she is shut out from the sordid family business. (“Words can’t express the wonder and talent of Diane Keaton,” Coppola wrote in a social media tribute following her death.) The role launched a formidable dramatic run of women who test social constraints, often at great personal risk. Keaton battles a grim New York bar scene and family demons in Looking for Mr Goodbar (1977), weathers stormy early-20th-century history and Warren Beatty in the Academy Award-winning Reds, and takes up with a death-row convict as a warden’s wife in Mrs Soffel (1984).
All showcase Keaton’s in-the-moment technique, though for many, her unfailing knack for comedy remained her signature. It’s there in the precision absurdity of Sleeper (1973) and Love and Death (1975), the alternately effusive and hesitant rhythms of Annie Hall, and the madcap gumshoe games of Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993). Her director and co-star in all four, Woody Allen, told Keaton never to worry about her career, she said, because she was always funny, and “funny is money”. The two dated early in her career and remained collaborators and close friends until her death. Keaton publicly defended Allen against the 1992 allegation of child molestation made by his former partner, Mia Farrow, tweeting in 2018: “Woody Allen is my friend and I continue to believe him.”
Keaton also embraced Hollywood comedies that were tagged as light entertainment but grew a devoted fan base. Her multimillion-grossing collaborations with director Nancy Meyers began with Baby Boom (1987) and continued with Father of the Bride (1991) and Something’s Gotta Give, for which Keaton earned an Oscar nomination. In Hugh Wilson’s The First Wives Club (1996), Keaton teamed with Midler and Goldie Hawn as divorcees giving comeuppance to their exes. The climactic rendition of the song “You Don’t Own Me” joins Keaton’s memorable musical moments, including a heart-catching “If I Fell” in Shoot the Moon (1982) and “Seems Like Old Times” in Annie Hall.
Keaton also directed her own features, including Unstrung Heroes (1995) and Hanging Up (2000), a 1991 episode of Twin Peaks and the 1987 documentary Heaven, which addressed the afterlife in her down-to-earth manner through everyday accounts. (A producer, too, she helped bring in Gus Van Sant to direct the searing 2003 school-shooting film Elephant.)
Off screen as much as on, Keaton was a style inspiration. She perennially donned modern ensembles and suiting every bit as distinctive as the hat-vest-tie outfit from Annie Hall. Her impact was apparent on successive generations of young women. Sex and the City star Cynthia Nixon wrote in a social media tribute: “When I was a kid, Diane Keaton was my absolute idol. I loved her acting. I loved her vibe. I loved her everything. Starting with when I was 12, I tried to dress like her.”
Yet Keaton’s insightful, penetrating memoirs evince an aversion to myth-making: in Then Again (2011), she paired her life story with that of her mother, and in Brother & Sister (2020), with her sibling, Randy, who has struggled with mental illness.
A loyal Angeleno despite her New York roles, Keaton blazed her own path in life as well. She never married, breezily but affectionately writing of her great loves: “The names changed, from Dave to Woody, then Warren, and finally Al.” At 50, she adopted a girl, Dexter, and later a boy, Duke, raising them as a single mother. Keaton is survived by her two children.