Diane Keaton

1946-2025

How can Diane Keaton be dead, and before her death-obsessed friend and key collaborator Woody Allen? In Annie Hall (1977), Allen’s Alvy was always buying Keaton’s Annie books with the words “death” or “dying” in the title; the first book he bought for Annie was The Denial of Death (1973). The desperately anxious Annie has to get away from all that because she is so vividly and eccentrically alive, so there, and she doesn’t need or appreciate this added anxiety from Alvy about not being alive anymore and what that might mean. Yet it marks her as surely as it must have marked or changed Keaton herself.

News of Keaton’s death shocked and hurt me, for she was a magic, disarming figure of her time, larger-than-life, emphatically herself, and beloved by pretty much everyone. By me, certainly. I was very struck by her as a child and then as a teenager, in particular; somehow I always thought of her the way I thought about Katharine Hepburn, as a role model of individuality. Her insistence on total lack of confidence felt bossy, and her intimidating vulnerability delighted me.

All of Keaton’s highly idiosyncratic tics, stammers, and grimaces, which she carried with her from part to part, from comedy to drama, and in all her public appearances, were meant to broadcast her elaborate insecurity and seeming bashfulness, and this style was forged in the 1970s, a very neurotic era where she became an emblem and style icon, but there was a well of fathoms-deep anger running underneath them as a kind of motor. She spoke always with hesitations, with repeated words, with “oh’s” and “um’s,” even in period pieces.

There was an immediacy to her work when Keaton was at her best, and a very distinctive forcefulness, because she flings herself so totally into the moment, and there’s a special excitement when she does that because we can feel how fragile her ego is, both performing and otherwise. Acting was dangerous for Keaton, but she needed to risk what she was risking in order to work a sort of catharsis for herself, and wring herself out. Does being in the moment in such an extreme way inevitably lead into the jags and grooves of set and recognizable mannerisms? With Keaton, it did seem that way, especially as her career continued past age 40, but in her best early work she transcended this.

Keaton studied acting in the 1960s with Sanford Meisner, and he is best known for a repetition exercise where you stare deeply into the eyes of your scene partner and repeat things you notice about them: “You’re wearing blue,” one actor will say, and the other actor will repeat, “I’m wearing blue,” and so forth. That training shows in Keaton’s work because she is often able to burrow deep down into a scene when she feels comfortable with another actor.

She gained notice as the one member of the cast of the hippie musical Hair who would not disrobe for the nude scene. Keaton then played on stage with Woody Allen in Play It Again, Sam and briefly became his girlfriend, and this association would turn out to be major for her. When he saw her in that play, Jack Benny reportedly said, “That girl is going to be gigantic.”

Keaton played the ever-thankless part of Kay in both The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather: Part II (1974), and she suffers in those movies from the inattention of the writers, the director Francis Ford Coppola, and even from the costume designers and wig makers, who outfit her awkwardly. You can see her talent struggling to make an impact, particularly in the second film, but her role is always such an afterthought that her gaucheries and inexperience are exposed in certain close-ups, while in others she has her full mature emotional fire.

Keaton then worked with Allen on screen in the movie of Play It Again, Sam (1972), and already she was dressing in her own odd but beautifully stylish way, covering up as much of her body as possible with long skirts, high-necked shirts, hats, and large belts. “You’re such a knock-out, why are you such a mass of symptoms?” Allen asks her in that movie, where they are two neurotics talking themselves through anxiety attacks and therapeutic overkill. She spread her wings a bit more as the high-style, futuristic bad poet Luna in Allen’s Sleeper (1973).

Keaton finds her own blithe, wacky comedy timing in these early Allen movies, delivering her lines in a breathless rush and knowing just when to fall into a droll sort of deadpan tone within that rush. She was creating her own comic character on screen: hedonistic, maybe a little dim, spoiled, and lovably zany. Keaton rides her own emotions very high and then surfs on them, so that there is a curious extra intensity about her. Her impression of Brando’s Stanley Kowalski to Allen’s Blanche DuBois in Sleeper is funny precisely because it’s such an inexact sketch of his performance, with a mannered little head tilt.

Somehow Keaton turns what might be seen as performing deficiencies into comic assets because she seems so game for anything, and so non-professional, somehow. Watching her is like watching someone bluff their way through something difficult on sheer nerve, or like seeing a familiar family member in a hilariously unfamiliar situation. That was her considerable charm in her early Allen movies, and luckily the last scenes of both Sleeper and Love and Death (1975) involve Keaton and Allen trying to bluff their way through a situation and fool people, so this plays right into her strengths as a comic.

Love and Death is probably Allen’s funniest movie, and Keaton makes a key contribution to it, finding exactly the right tone of straight-faced silliness. When she is complimented on her skin by an admirer, she says, “Yes, it covers my whole body,” firing off this odd little one-liner so fast that it barely has time to land. She rings lots of changes on loopy selfishness in Love and Death, and her composure is formidable: not only does she manage to keep it when being offered the mustache of her beloved Ivan (Henry Czarniak) at his funeral, but she even manages to shed a tear before being offered Ivan’s “letters,” which turn out to be a bunch of paper alphabet letters. This doesn’t sound very funny in description, but anyone who has seen Love and Death many times knows that it kills as a routine, just as many others do. (If you look closely, you can see that Keaton is just dying to laugh here, and that makes it even funnier.)

Also in Love and Death there’s the classic “fields of wheat” bit where Keaton stares right into the camera while Allen stares slightly off and she worries about suffocation in a relationship with him and cries, “Open a window…no, not that one, the one in the bathroom.” The slightest wavering or lack of conviction in facial expression or intonation would kill the bit, which is sending up pretentious art films while also harkening way back to Groucho Marx’s send-up of Eugene O’Neill’s play Strange Interlude in Animal Crackers (1930), but Keaton stays just focused enough without ever pressing too hard. And then there’s a wonderful sort of blooper scene here where a prop doesn’t quite work and Allen cuts the sound and keeps hitting Keaton over the head with a bottle, which she takes gamely and apologetically, as if to say, “Of course!” until she finally falls back down a wall and pretends to be knocked out, like a kid playing outside with friends and clearly having a ball.

Keaton then took her signature part for Allen, Annie Hall (1977), a film-length valentine to her quirks and hesitations for which she won the best actress Oscar. Annie is a would-be actress, photographer and then singer from Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. She puts all of her insecurities right on the surface of her behavior, editorializing on her own self-consciousness with real charm. Dressed in baggy male pants, a vest, and a tie, Annie pursues Allen’s Alvy at the start rather than the other way around, and they have real opposites-attract chemistry (watch the way the normally dour and eye-rolling Allen really laughs in response to Keaton in the famous scene where they try to cook lobsters).

Alvy says that Annie is great sexually because she’s “polymorphously perverse,” alive to pleasure, but she’s a pot smoker who needs to smoke up before going to bed with him. Alvy pushes her to take college courses to get her up to speed for the intellectual Upper West Side of Manhattan, and under his influence she grows more poised and reflective, singing “Seems Like Old Times” in a nightclub in a high, small, sweet voice, so that the sincerity of her delivery stops the movie cold.

That same year, sporting the same long, flippable hair, she took a risk and played the sexually hungry teacher of hearing-impaired children Theresa Dunn in the rambling, disco-set Looking for Mr. Goodbar. Her insecurity was explained here by scoliosis of the spine and a scar on her back from it, and the character’s sexual promiscuity seems to grow out of her lapsed Catholicism, her reaction to her obnoxious father, and her day-dreamy nature. Keaton got naked for this role, a decade after her refusal to do the group nude scene for Hair, which signaled her new will to explore. (In a piece of deft casting, the similarly mannered and cerebral Tuesday Weld plays her flaky sex bomb sister.)

She doubled down on her “uh huh’s” and her elaborately flinching delivery of words in Goodbar, and she retreats sometimes into a kind of blank-faced fugue state from which she reacts with exaggerated alarm when someone breaks through it. Keaton seems to be jolted by emotion when something hits her or strikes her fancy, and she falls into strange routines of mockery and inward-turned dialogue, as if she were constantly in a state of eccentric behavioral flux, often catching up late with what someone else says or does like Jean Arthur used to in her 1930s-40s movies.

Keaton is in her own world and style in the 1970s, but she is very far from a dithering Lee Strasberg actress like Sandy Dennis because everything she does is ultra-legible in a distinct way that helped to make her a truly popular star. She will sometimes press down unexpectedly hard on a word or a reaction because she wants to keep us off balance, and always there is a sense of spontaneity, so that she seems to be living and working out her part in the moment, right then, which makes her capable of surprising both us and herself.

Keaton lets herself get overcome by things, opening herself up to feel anything she can as deeply as she possibly can, especially her girlish delight with her most dangerous sexual partner in Goodbar, Richard Gere’s Tony. At her best, no one is more responsive and more alive on screen than Keaton, which is why Theresa’s brutal murder at the end of Goodbar carries such a special, unfair sting.

Keaton played the poet Renata in Allen’s first drama, Interiors (1978), where her poems are supposed to be better than Luna’s efforts in Sleeper. Renata is a smoker, a gloomy woman who says to her therapist that the “intimacy” of death embarrasses her, and Keaton’s gestures of anguish are just as self-conscious as the chilly art film style of the visuals. She worked for a sixth time on screen with Allen as the pseudo-intellectual Mary Wilke in Manhattan (1979), who at first seems the opposite of Annie Hall, a hyper-critical, privileged Radcliffe woman. “I’m beautiful, and I’m bright, and I deserve better!” Mary whines to her married lover Yale (Michael Murphy), but Allen’s Isaac eventually quips that her self-esteem is “a notch below Kafka’s.” Keaton plays the scene where Yale breaks up with Mary at an outdoor cafe very well: barely able to look at him, stuck deep in some trough of despond that makes her look puffy and bilious.

Keaton had gone as far as she could with Allen, and she entered the 1980s with a new male collaborator, Warren Beatty, with whom she had a romance and worked on the epic Reds (1981) for quite some time. Beatty demanded interminable takes of each scene, and he pressed on Keaton so much that she reveals new depths of rage and impatience in the arguments that occur between her failed writer Louise Bryant and Beatty’s more assured John Reed. She also reaches a new depth of feeling in her scenes with Jack Nicholson’s Eugene O’Neill that form a memorable little playlet about a bitter love affair amidst the sprawl and reach of Reds.

Louise Bryant in Reds is a dentist’s wife from Portland who wants to be an emancipated woman circa 1915, and she can be very defensive, petulant, and passive aggressive when she isn’t being aggressive aggressive. Keaton’s early heroines for Woody Allen had been so likable as to be adorable, but her Mary Wilke and Louise Bryant are unlikable women, jagged and hostile.

A production source on the set of Reds calls Keaton “a real rage rat” in Peter Biskind’s biography of Beatty, and clearly this affair with him, and her working with him on Reds, was not a particularly happy time for her. There are certain close-ups in Reds where Keaton seems touched to the core by fear and anger, so that she radiates the pain of that exposure, and there are also times when her wide-set eyes hold the clarity and the detail that Lillian Gish used to display in her silent film close-ups.

The relationship with Beatty ended, which pained Keaton, and she used this pain creatively in what is certainly her most out-there, limitless dramatic performance in Shoot the Moon (1982), where she played Faith Dunlap, a wife with four young daughters who finds herself in the middle of a tough divorce from her writer husband George (Albert Finney).

Performances are sometimes called “raw,” and this is certainly a case in point, for this is a Strasberg-style performance from Keaton (she had been introduced to the Strasberg version of the Method by Al Pacino) where she actually inhabits ruined psychic states instead of acting and shaping them, and the result is touching, of course, but touching in a way we might feel if we saw someone crying in the street. Keaton allows herself to be seen disintegrating on screen, dissolving into a puddle in the scenes where Faith is alone. When she smokes grass while taking a bath and sings the Beatles’ “If I Fell,” Keaton reaches such an intimate place of emotional exposure that she looks transparent, and this is really something to see, an event, even.

And in the fight scenes with Finney, a great actor who is also digging very deep into himself in this movie, Keaton achieves a bruising domestic battery realism. The decisive scene where Faith calls George on his seeing another woman and they start smashing plates in their kitchen is one of the most believable couple fights ever put on screen: look particularly at the expressively awkward way Keaton drapes herself against a window when the fight dies down.

When she makes a gesture of anger here, whether it’s flipping her hair behind her ear or taking a Bette Davis-like puff on a cigarette and sitting decisively on the stairs of her house, Keaton can fill her whole body with emotion and blast it out to us. The scene where Finney and Keaton argue in a restaurant marks a strange shift in tone in Shoot the Moon, accompanied by a much speedier, surface delivery by Keaton that’s more like Luna in Sleeper and Sonja in Love and Death than Faith, but she is back on firm ground in the uncompromisingly rough closing scenes.

Keaton excelled in Mrs. Soffel (1984), a period piece in which she was the repressed wife of a prison warden in 1901 Pittsburgh who opens up to Mel Gibson’s prisoner Ed Biddle. She plays the first scenes in a haze of illness and cloudy unrest, but as she falls in love with Gibson’s Ed, Keaton slowly breaks out her most star-like smile, and she even leers at him, in a pretty modern sort of way, as he takes a saw from under her skirt (this anachronistic performing risk really pays off as a relevant shock amidst the film’s moody languor).

“Put your hands on me, Ed…I’m so cold,” she tells him, when they’re on the lam and they’re finally about to make love. The morning after, when he confesses to her that he killed a man, Keaton’s Kate is so far-gone with love for him that this new information registers awfully sadly on her ghostly, out-on-a-limb face. In this momentous romance, evocatively shot in snowy landscapes by Gillian Armstrong, Keaton was at her very best, even managing to sneak in a few notes of screwball comedy when Kate is feeling most liberated.

She worked herself into neurotic tizzies as the self-defeating sister in Crimes of the Heart (1986), and she did a star turn in the yuppie comedy Baby Boom (1987), which was a big hit for her. Nothing was ever quite the same for Keaton after that. She had a large personal success in the romantic comedy Something’s Gotta Give (2003) with Jack Nicholson, and in that movie she “did” Diane Keaton, but in the best scenes she allowed herself to be sexy and vulnerable, and hedonistic. Beyond that hit, unfortunately, there was a succession of ramshackle commercial vehicles where she teamed up with any older male actor she could and really tested the patience of fans. I loyally watched them all, and I recently finished watching the last two formula pictures she made via streaming. Poor as they were, I was finally happy just to still be in her company.

Probably her funniest appearances as an older woman were on Ellen DeGeneres’s talk show, where she did her frazzled, semi-edgy thing while throwing back red wine on ice. She coasted for a long time, but her films for Woody Allen and her three major dramatic performances from the 1980s secure her reputation as one of the most distinctive screen stars of her era, a one-of-a-kind romantic, always so ready to throw herself recklessly into anything life or the movies had to offer.

Keaton directed several features, the first of which was a documentary about the idea of Heaven (1987), which I have included below. Clearly where she might be headed after death pre-occupied her more than a bit throughout her adult life. I don’t know if there is a heaven, but if there is, I hope to see her there.

(This tribute is partly adapted from a chapter in my book The Art of American Screen Acting, 1960 to Today {2019}.)