by Stephen Vagg
Diane Keaton’s passing has prompted a great deal of grief on social media, which is unsurprising, really, considering that talent, beauty and filmography, not to mention that from all accounts she seemed to be a genuinely nice person. And there were a lot of those accounts, because not only was Diane Keaton a film star, who traditionally attracted a lot of attention, she dated plenty of famous men (Warren Beatty, Woody Allen, Al Pacino), which gets you even more notice, and many of those men wrote about her (Allen, Pacino, Larry McMurtry), sometimes superbly well (Annie Hall) which ramped up the Diane Keaton awareness even further, as did the fact that she was always working with new people. Personally, we thought she was one of those actors who would live until their nineties (no logical reason, she just gave off longevity vibes), so we’re a little in shock that she’s gone. Give your loved ones a hug next time you see them.
With this piece, we wanted to examine Diane Keaton the film star, because she enjoyed a remarkably extended career in lead roles – after all, her second feature was The Godfather and her third was Play It Again, Sam, which is a pretty strong way to start off. And Keaton maintained her status as a film star for all of her career, i.e. she regularly toplined studio movies, she could get films greenlit by virtue of her presence in them, even late in the day. She avoided the “studio execs decree that you’re too old” curse that strikes down many a female movie star: 2003’s Something’s Gotta Give, made when Keaton was (gasp) in her late fifties, was a commercial blockbuster, while 2018’s Book Club, shot when she was in her seventies, made over $100 million at the box office.
Part of Keaton’s longevity as a star was due to the fact that she had a bread-and-butter genre she could rely on – all movie stars have this, sort of how all top bowlers in cricket have a stock delivery they resort to (eg Mark Wahlberg – action, Leo DiCaprio – whatever Scorsese’s doing). In Keaton’s case, it was comedy: her first feature, Lovers and Other Strangers, was a comedy, and she kept returning to that well throughout her career: there were Woody Allen’s “earlier, funnier” movies, the corporate gal romances, the buddy-gal pictures, the wacky family ensemble pieces (a lot of those), the late-in-life romances. She was a brilliant comic actor, energetic, great with dialogue, warm, attractive, and generous, who always made her co-stars seem better – after all, Woody Allen never had a bigger hit at the box office with him in a leading role than Annie Hall and Manhattan, nor did Goldie Hawn and Bette Midler ever repeat (commercially) what they achieved with Keaton in The First Wives Club.
However, comedies only tell half the story. Keaton’s career was remarkable for the number of risks she took – for instance, she followed Annie Hall with the ripped-from-the-headlines-sex-in-the-city drama Looking for Mr Goodbar (proving she could carry a movie to commercial success on her own), and Woody Allen’s first serious drama, the broccoli-like-yet-broccoli-is-good-for-you Interiors. Or maybe, this isn’t so remarkable considering that just prior to Annie Hall, Keaton had appeared in two “safe” comedies with big male co-stars that flopped (I Will I Will for Now and Harry and Walter Go to New York).
After the comic triumph of Manhattan (a complete 180 from her work in Annie Hall, incidentally), Keaton went on a streak of dramas with top-flight directors playing an astonishing variety of roles: Warren Beatty’s Reds (commie journo), Alan Parker’s Shoot the Moon (divorced wife of abusive man), George Roy Hill’s The Little Drummer Girl (pro-Palestinian actress turned Israeli agent), Australia’s own Gillian Armstrong’s Mrs Soffel (prison warden’s horny wife who runs off with inmate), Australia’s own Bruce Beresford’s Crimes of the Heart (eccentric Southern sister). Of these movies, only Reds was a hit, but they were serious works which have lingered on in the public consciousness, which you need to do in order to maintain a long career. And while from Baby Boom onwards, Keaton never went too long without a comedy, she kept mixing it up (The Good Mother, Marvin’s Room, The Only Thrill, various TV movies). She also never repeated her iconic performances (Annie Hall, Looking for Mr Goodbar, Manhattan) although the pressure to do so must have been strong.
Keaton directed several times, very well, less often than she should have, in fact; she also did some producing – at one stage she tried to get up a remake of The Blue Angel with Madonna (with Alan Parker to direct from a Neal Jimenez script) which would have been amazing.
There were, inevitably, disappointments, as there are for every star: for instance, in addition to the aforementioned Blue Angel, it’s a shame that none of the many attempts to have Diane Keaton appear in a film of Larry McMurtry’s writing happened (they were good mates and he drooled over her in print many a time), or that she didn’t work more with Woody Allen in the post-Mia period when most of his love interests were played by actresses born in the 1960s – their reunion in Manhattan Murder Mystery is a reminder of how good their chemistry was. Interestingly, Keaton pulled out of starring in two movies with British directors – Bryan Forbes’ The Stepford Wives (replaced by Katherine Ross) and Bill Forsyth’s Housekeeping (replaced by Christine Lahti). Forbes whinged that Keaton turned down the role in Stepford because her analyst didn’t like it – we mention this because Forbes is one of the few people who slagged off Keaton publicly during her career; she seems to have been very popular (did she lie to Forbes so as to not hurt his feelings?). She survived some epic disasters such as Town and Country, and that perm in The Godfather Part 3 (possibly saved by Al Pacino’s even worse haircut).
Keaton’s career is doubly remarkable when one considers that she came to fame during the hyper-masculine-though-still-dominated-by-nerds New Hollywood of the 1970s, when female stars were squeezed out; there were still some around but most of them had come to prominence the previous decade (Barbra Streisand, Goldie Hawn, Jane Fonda) – Keaton and later Meryl Streep were the only newbies who lasted.
It was an amazing career, full of iconic zeitgeist films – The First Wives Club and Something’s Gotta Give changed the notion of what a commercial Hollywood movie could be as much as Annie Hall and The Godfather. Thanks for everything, Ms Keaton. By all means, put on Annie Hall or Baby Boom tonight, but don’t forget to have another (or even first) look at Shoot the Moon or Little Drummer Girl.
