Diane Keaton, who remained one of Hollywood’s most eccentric and beloved actresses decades after her Oscar-winning performance in Annie Hall, died at 79.
Her film producer confirmed her death to NPR on Saturday.
When I met her for an interview in 2014, she sported her signature look: a bowler hat, tinted-lens glasses, and oversized clothes.
“Clothes that really hide the body,” she joked half-seriously. “There’s a lot to hide in my case, so I’m the only person left on Earth with this particular look.”
Keaton was truly a kind of fashionista, inspiring generations of women with her unconventional lifestyle. On screen, she was known for portraying captivating, unique, and sometimes eccentric characters.
In one of her memoirs, Keaton wrote about aging and love in Hollywood and about becoming a mother later in life. She was also frank about some of her insecurities; she worried about aging, thinning hair, droopy eyes. But Keaton told me that later in life, she had finally learned to accept that all imperfections are beautiful.
“I feel that the wrong can be right. It can be right in many ways,” she said. “So all those things you’re disappointed in yourself about can work in your favor.”
She was born Diane Hall in Los Angeles in 1946, daughter of real estate broker and civil engineer Jack Hall. Her mother, Dorothy, was crowned Mrs. Los Angeles.
Keaton said her mother encouraged her as she pursued her dreams of becoming a singer and performer in New York. After studying at the Neighborhood Playhouse in the 1960s, Keaton ended up as an understudy in the original Broadway production of the rock musical Hair.
“It was wild. It was unexpected,” she said. “But I could see that I really wasn’t a hippie. I knew I wasn’t a hippie in Hair.”
Keaton famously refused to go onstage naked in Hair’s final scene.
Then came Woody Allen, with whom she had a romantic relationship. Allen cast her in Play It Again, Sam, his play, then his film. Also in his comedies Sleeper, Love and Death, Manhattan, and, of course, Annie Hall.
Keaton’s eccentric and quirky role as Annie Hall and her “lah-de-dah” charm earned her a Best Actress Oscar in 1978. She thanked Woody Allen in her acceptance speech and later throughout her career. She stood by him during the controversy over allegations that Allen one day abused his daughter, which the director denies.
“That will never change,” Keaton said about her support for Allen. “He is my very, very good friend.”
In Annie Hall, Keaton showcased her talent for comedy and singing. But she also had dramatic roles in film, most famously in the Godfather trilogy. Her character marries into the Corleone mafia family.
Her Godfather co-star, Al Pacino, was one of her real-life boyfriends. Another of her real-life loves, Warren Beatty, directed her in his 1981 film Reds.
In the historical drama about journalist John Reed, Keaton played his love interest, activist Louise Bryant.
“I loved her position in life,” Keaton said about her character, who she said took a backseat to Reed (played by Beatty). “And she wanted to be great. She wanted greatness in her. And fighting for herself, and failing and failing. I loved her for that. I loved her for her flaws. She was a difficult person who wasn’t very likable, but I loved her.”
Jack Nicholson was also in Reds. He teamed up with Keaton again in 2003 for the comedy Something’s Gotta Give. In that film, Keaton also starred opposite Keanu Reeves.
Diane Keaton never married, although in films she was one of the rare older American actresses who still got leading romantic roles. That was something actress Carol Kane, a longtime friend of Keaton, praised at the time.
“She’s playing the love interest a lot,” Kane said. “You know, kissing passionately and going into the bedroom… at an age when most people just say: ‘OK, well, that part is over.’ I mean, she gets more and more beautiful because she’s more and more herself.”
For years, Keaton acted in films like Looking For Mr. Goodbar, The First Wives Club, and Baby Boom. She directed the documentary Heaven in 1987. She also wrote books about her life, about architecture, photography, and beauty; collected photos of handsome men, renovated beautiful houses, and, as a single mother, raised two beautiful children. When she turned 50, she adopted her daughter, Dexter, and five years later, her son Duke.
“It’s an unconventional life, it’s true,” she told me. “But I don’t really see it that way, because I think everyone has a life–is there a life that doesn’t have a story that’s pretty amazing? I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t. I just embraced the life I have because it had a purpose and it was very simple: I wanted to be in the movies.”
Keaton told me she was a late bloomer. But her fans might say death came for her too soon.
Source: npr.org by Mandalit del Barco