She brought so much of her own idiosyncratic style and offbeat personality into her acting that at times it was hard to tell where Diane Keaton the actress and the character she was playing diverged. Audiences, however, loved both, and in a career that spanned over 50 years she won them over with performances that were sometimes comedic, sometimes dramatic, and often a little of each. The winner of an Academy Award, two Golden Globes, and an AFI Life Achievement Award, Keaton passed away last week in Southern California at 79.
A SoCal native, she was born Diane Hall in Los Angeles on January 5th, 1946. As a girl she staged plays and short films with her three siblings. But it was her mother’s competing in beauty pageants that got young Diane interested in the stage. In an interview she recalled auditioning for a junior high talent show. “I was going to sing ‘All I Want For Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth,'” she said. “But it was my mother’s idea that I black out my teeth at the tryout, and that of course secured my position on the list of people who would be in the talent show.”
After graduating high school in Santa Ana and briefly attending local colleges, Diane journeyed East to New York to pursue an acting career and studied at the Neighborhood Playhouse. As there was already a working actress named Diane Hall, she dropped her surname and took on her mom’s maiden name to become Diane Keaton. Her first major Broadway role was as part of the ensemble cast of the taboo-breaking musical Hair (she missed out on a $50 bonus by refusing to perform nude at the end of Act I, though).
In 1968 Keaton auditioned for and won the female lead in Woody Allen’s stage comedy Play It Again, Sam. Her performance as Linda not only earned her a Tony nomination, but it marked the start of a long collaboration–and nearly as long romantic relationship–with Allen. Keaton made her screen debut in the 1970 comedy Lovers and Other Strangers. Over the next two years she would turn up on such TV shows as Love, American Style, The F.B.I., Mannix, and even Rod Serling’s Night Gallery…not to mention a deodorant commercial.
Her movie career kicked into high gear in 1972 with two popular and diverse films: as Linda in the screen version of Play It Again, Sam and as Kay Adams-Corleone, girlfriend and eventual second wife of Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone, in Francis Ford Coppola’s Mafia epic The Godfather. Keaton would return as Kay for The Godfather Part II and Part III (she would also have a romance with Pacino in the mid-’70s). Meanwhile, she would reunite with Allen on the sci-fi spoof Sleeper in 1973 and the Napoleonic romp Love and Death two years later. 1976 found her co-starring with Elliott Gould in a pair of comedic misfires, I Will, I Will…for Now and Harry and Walter Go to New York, the latter also featuring Michael Caine.
In 1977 Diane and Woody played polar opposites who meet, fall in and out of love, and sometimes reunite–not always in that order–in Allen’s acclaimed “nervous romance” Annie Hall. As the title Minnesota-born gal with penchants for speeding, saying “La-de-da, la-de-da,” and accessorizing her wardrobe with men’s vests and neckties, Diane created a fashion trend while garnering an Academy Award for Best Actress. They would work togather again on 1978’s Interiors and in 1979’s Manhattan. In between Keaton would raise eyebrows as the repressed schoolteacher who starts frequenting singles bars looking for casual hook-ups in the steamy drama Looking for Mr. Goodbar.
The 1980s started with a bang as Keaton joined co-star/writer and director Warren Beatty for his 1981 historical epic Reds. Her turn as 1910s journalist Louise Bryant earned her a second Oscar nomination…and she and Beatty launched an off-screen romance as well. Other key ’80s films included the 1982 family-in-crisis drama Shoot the Moon; 1984’s espionage thriller The Little Drummer Girl and the costume piece Mrs. Soffel with Mel Gibson; and the 1986 dark comedy Crimes of the Heart alongside Jessica Lange and Sissy Spacek.
Keaton delighted fans as a career-minded businesswoman who suddenly becomes mother to a late cousin’s infant girl in 1987’s Baby Boom, and followed it up the next year with a harrowing drama about parenting and divorce, The Good Mother. 1987 also saw Keaton try her hand at directing with the provocative afterlife documentary Heaven.
Diane teamed with Steve Martin in 1991 for a hit remake of the ’50s Spencer Tracy comedy Father of the Bride, returning for its sequel four years later. 1993 found her alongside Woody Allen once again (their last collaboration) in the comedic whodunit Manhattan Murder Mystery, while she directed Michael Richards and John Turturro in 1995’s seriocomedy Unstrung Heroes. 1996 was another dichotomous year for the actress. She and co-stars Bette Midler and Goldie Hawn charmed audiences as the vengeance-minded members of The First Wives Club. Meanwhile her turn as a woman who cares for her bedridden father–only to learn she has leukemia–and seeks help from her estranged sister (Meryl Streep) in Marvin’s Room got Keaton Academy Award nomination number three.
In the 2000s Keaton and Beatty shared the screen again in the 2001 box-office flop Town & Country. Two years later, a reunion with another Reds co-star–Jack Nicholson–in writer/director Nancy Meyers’ romcom Something’s Gotta Give met with critical and audience success and earned Diane her fourth and final Oscar nom. The actress moved gracefully into middle age with parts in such films as The Family Stone (2005), Because I Said So (2007), Morning Glory (2010), and The Big Wedding (2013). In 2014 she co-starred with Michael Douglas in And So It Goes and Morgan Freeman in 5 Flights Up, while she supplied the voice of Jenny, mother of memory-troubled blue tang Dory (Ellen DeGeneres), in Pixar’s 2016 feature Finding Dory. Among her later film appearances were 2018’s Book Club and Book Club: The Next Chapter in 2023; 2019’s “senior citizen cheerleader” comedy Poms; the 2023 love story Maybe I Do (reteaming her with Gere for the first time since 1978’s Goodbar); and her final role in 2024’s Summer Camp.
Saying that she wanted to devote herself fully to her art, Keaton never married. She was in her 50s when she adopted two children, son Duke and daughter Dexter. After suffering health issues earlier in the year, Diane passed away at 79 on October 11. In her 2014 memoir Then Again, one of several books she authored, the actress confessed “I learned I couldn’t shed light on love other than to feel its comings and goings and be grateful.” Audiences around the world loved and were grateful for Keaton’s half-century-plus body of work.