Diane Keaton’s legacy is her idea of ​​beauty

Diane Keaton appeared in 60 films, had more than two dozen television parts, and received four Academy Award nominations for Best Actress (and one win in 1977). Annie Hall), has multiple directing credits (including an episode of Twin Peaks) and had a seismic effect on women’s fashion. It was all driven by a quest to understand and embody beauty – a word that has haunted her ever since her father told her on her 15th birthday that she was beautiful. Keaton didn’t want to be pretty. She wanted to be beautiful.

As the Los Angeles native states in one of her eight books, a memoir titled Let’s just say it wasn’t prettyKeaton hated that word. She hated when her mother, a housewife and amateur photographer, told her she had a beautiful smile. She hated it when the teacher complimented her on her beautiful dress. “I was old enough to understand that beautiful was a poor cousin of beautiful,” Keaton writes. “The ‘pretty’ dress was a proper dress from Bullock’s Department Store, not a beatnik jacket with black stockings and a hat. It was pretty for Sandra Dee, easy and light. The color is fading.” But the beauty of it, Keaton continues, is that it “keeps you coming back for more.” It makes you ask questions. “It’s vast, it’s unknown, it’s wonderful… and I’ve been chasing it ever since.”

Cinema, popular culture, fashion, and the public perception of female attractiveness all benefited from Keaton’s lifelong creative mission. The remarkable consistency in her life’s work came from her understanding of coded languages ​​and the difference between superficiality and depth, transience and eternal. Eventually, her troubled mind found beauty in men’s clothing from thrift stores, in the prewar buildings of Los Angeles (she served at the time). On the Board of Directors of the LA Conservancy She narrated their ads and historical videos), using over-the-counter reading glasses (she had her own line, Keaton readers), and in lively reflections on what holds meaning in this life on earth and what comes after. Her first film as a director was in 1987 skyis a semi-experimental work consisting of old film clips, news and documentary clips, and meditations on eternity by a few dozen interviewees, including her mother Dorothy and sister Dory. “I see him as Groucho Marx,” one woman told Keaton. for him Being God. “He’s always playing tricks on us.”

So was Keaton, in her own way. By the time she died at age 79, she had a star persona as strong as her original fashion idol Katharine Hepburn — the kind that made unwary viewers think she was just playing herself. After her Broadway debut hair — where she notably refused to appear on stage naked, even though it would have earned her an extra $50 per show — Keaton became a pioneer in comedies that showcased her talent for making elaborately scripted dialogue seem spontaneous. Her repetition, stuttering, and strange intonations were largely her own, as her interviews attest. Some viewers incorrectly assumed that she learned this manner of speaking from her famous friend Woody Allen, who directed her in eight films, spanning from 1972. Play it again, Sam During 1993 Manhattan Murder Mystery (Which she continued to support after he was accused of abuse guardian, “I have nothing to say about that, except: I believe my friend.” The label “ditzy” has stuck with her, mainly due to her work in Allen’s early films, most notably Annie Hallwhere the character’s signature phrase is “Well, la-dee-dah, la la.”

In later comedies such as First Wives Club, Family Stonethe Father of the bride films, and a series of 1960s romantic comedies (including Something has to give(With Jack Nicholson’s aging lothario and Keanu Reeves’ good young doctor vying for her affections) Keaton kept playing the oddball with an odd way of speaking, though none of it was frivolous or stupid. Her advertising director is J.C. White Baby Boom She’s a powerful businesswoman with a corner office who loses her job and her boyfriend after adopting a child, then moves to the country, sets up a gourmet cider business, and stumbles upon a country doctor played by Sam Shepard. Carol Lipton in Manhattan Murder Mystery It is a human encyclopedia of horrific crimes. Sonia V Love and death She is an 18th century Russian woman who must hide her brilliance from a sexist society. Her showy monologue, which she delivers more to herself than to her lover, is a constant logic: “Love is suffering. To avoid suffering, one must not love, but then suffer not to love. Therefore, love is suffering, not love is suffering, suffering is suffering. To be happy is to love, and to be happy is to suffer, but to suffer makes one miserable; therefore, to be miserable, one must love or be loved.” To suffer or suffer too much.” happiness. I hope you turn this down.”

Diane Keaton in Baby Boom.
Photo: United Artists/Courtesy Everett Collection

Although she excelled in comedy, Keaton was great in drama. In psychological thriller I’m looking for Mr. GoodbarShe agonizes as a self-destructive teacher, and her one-night stands represent an overdue rebellion against her stifling Christian upbringing. (Keaton, who grew up in a home so religious that she ratted out her brother for having a Playboy in his room, brought much of her own experiences to the role; the character was a once-repressed Jewish woman in Judith Rosner’s novel.) She plays the arc from submission to rebellion in a different time period in writer-director Gillian Armstrong’s piece. Mrs. SovilleThe true story of a 19th-century farm woman who falls in love with a prison inmate (Mel Gibson) and helps him and his brother (Matthew Modine) escape. Less successfully, she played a left-wing actress in the mold of Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave who was used by the CIA as well as the Palestine Liberation Army in Little drummer girl. Good mother It was a good attempt at a legal drama about a woman whose lover is accused of indecency with her young daughter. (This was four years before Allen’s accusations.) On television, she was a fanatical nun in the film version of the hit play. Sister Mary explains everything, A poor mother is struggling to make dinner for her children On thin iceand friend and advocate of convicted murderer Carla Faye Tucker (Jennifer Jason Leigh) in crossed. Of course, she was a nun again in the brilliant, hallucinogenic HBO drama The young pope (opposite Jude Law).

Keaton’s heyday as a dramatic actress was likely in the 1980s Reds – The true story of the turbulent relationship between writers John Reed and Louise Bryant during the rise of communism, starring, written, produced and directed by one of Keaton’s famous fans, Warren Beatty. As Louise, Keaton’s fierce wit and refusal to be deceptive gives a unifying shape to a sprawling saga, and makes you think that both Beatty’s John “Jack” Reed and the alcoholic playwright Eugene O’Neill would fall madly in love with her. When Jack goes to Russia, proving once again that his lust for political heroism trumps any love he professes for Louise, Eugene calmly tells her: “If you were mine, I wouldn’t share you with anyone… We would be the center of everything.” And it’s not just Eugene’s wooing of Louise. According to the biography of Peter Biskind The Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced AmericaThere was talk in Hollywood about Nicholson accepting the role in it Reds Because his ex-girlfriend, Michelle Phillips, was Hooked with Betty After their relationship ended, he was convinced that he could steal Keaton away as revenge. If so, the attempt has failed. (There were rumors that Nicholson and Keaton an act Hook up while shooting Something has to giveBut Keaton said that never happened.)

She lost the Best Actress award that year to her heroine Hepburn (in On the golden pond) and was similarly overlooked for her work in the 1982 Alan Parker classic Shoot the moona divorce drama written by Bo Goldman (Smell of a woman). The film co-stars Albert Finney as a popular, irascible writer named George and Keaton as Faith, the wife and mother of his children, who gives up her own dreams to support him, only to be abandoned for a younger woman (Karen Allen). Iman Keaton is a tea kettle that simmers until it explodes in justified rage. The scene in which Faith collapses in the bathtub after a breakup, smoking weed and singing the Beatles’ “If I Fell,” is a devastating depiction of the impact divorce has on people’s ability to function. The New YorkerCritic Pauline Kael’s review called her “a star without vanity. She is so completely challenged by the role of Faith that she is only concerned with getting the character right.”

Diane Keaton in Shoot the moon.
Photo: MGM Collection/Courtesy Everett

Keaton was also, of course, playing Kay Adams Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s film the godfather Triple. The entire film was dominated by men – a fact Keaton frequently mentioned in interviews in which she lavished effusive praise on her male actors but lamented the dearth of opportunities for actresses in general, especially those over 40. She had a long, on-again, off-again relationship with Al Pacino, which she unexpectedly rekindled while filming the film. The Godfather Part Threewhich includes a strange but charming scene in which Michael Corleone (Pacino) picks up his estranged wife dressed as a chauffeur. The scene is loosely derived from an incident that occurred during a film shoot The Godfather Part TwoWhen Pacino told Keaton that he never got a driver’s license because he lived his whole life in New York City, she taught him to drive in the casino parking lot. Even if Coppola didn’t understand Keaton’s importance to the series, Keaton did. According to Michael Schumacher Francis Ford Coppola: Lives of Filmmakersasked for $3 million for The Godfather Part ThreeThis is the same amount that Robert Duvall asked for and walked away from when he didn’t get it. She settled for $1.7 million, 48 times her salary The godfather is me.

Eventually, Keaton became the rare star whose name could be relied upon in the opening of a film — not just when she was young, but also well into her 60s. It could be said that women of her generation were as devoted to her as Clint Eastwood’s men, coming out to see it Something has to give (Her first completely nude appearance, at the age of 57) too Because I said so, mama’s son, morning glory, I love the CoopersAnd three Book club movies (part of the 21st century wave of ensemble comedies featuring female stars from previous eras). One of the characteristics of beauty is that it attracts attention and commands attention regardless of the social taboos or aesthetic standards of the moment. Ketone radiation was living proof.

Many of Keaton’s films have seemed better for being able to surrender to their overall beauty. It is known that the original title of Annie Hall He was Anhedonia (meaning an inability to experience pleasure), but was changed to reflect the dominant presence of Keaton (and her actual last name, Hall). The film has leaned around it in other ways. Her favorite wardrobe included jackets, ties, waistcoats and hats. It included her favorite songs to sing. The original cut took approximately two and a half hours, and according to its editor, Ralph Rosenblum, was a shapeless mass of cuts, loosely connected to the hero’s relationship with Annie. “And so we began to break in the direction of that relationship,” he wrote. When the shooting stops…the cutting begins. Allen reportedly resisted. He continued to film more scenes with his character Alvy Singer, perhaps in hopes of moving the needle back in his direction. But he finally gave in and accepted what happened Anhedonia He wanted to be Annie HallA film about Diane Keaton, beautiful as ever.