{"id":116476,"date":"2025-10-12T00:48:10","date_gmt":"2025-10-12T00:48:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/116476\/"},"modified":"2025-10-12T00:48:10","modified_gmt":"2025-10-12T00:48:10","slug":"charming-eccentric-and-likeable-no-star-had-energy-quite-like-diane-keaton-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/116476\/","title":{"rendered":"Charming, eccentric and likeable, no star had energy quite like Diane Keaton \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Diane Keaton<\/a>, who has died in Los Angeles at the age of 79<\/a>, was the sort of actor fans felt they knew personally. This is no slight on her versatility. She worked through a range of character types in a career that lasted close to 60 years. She was Michael Corleone\u2019s misused, conspicuously non-Sicilian wife in the Godfather trilogy. She played Louise Bryant, ground-breaking US journalist and activist, opposite Warren Beatty in Reds from 1981. But she was never able to fully escape association with the titular charmer in Woody Allen<\/a>\u2019s still irresistible Annie Hall from 1977. No wonder. Allen, who first dated Keaton while appearing with her in the Broadway production of Play it Again, Sam in 1969, named the character for her \u2013 she was born as Diane Hall \u2013 and mapped some of Keaton\u2019s traits onto the fictionalised Annie.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnnie Hall was everything,\u201d she told me in 2017<\/a>. \u201cWhere would I be without it? Where would I be without Woody? I wouldn\u2019t be here.\u201d She worked closely with costume designer Ruth Morley to produce an oversized boho look \u2013 huge ties, baggy pants \u2013 that remains a staple of urban fashion to this day. Keaton accepted that the charming, but conversationally uncertain, character was a variation on her own persona. She won an Oscar for the role and remained a much-loved presence ever after. <\/p>\n

\"DianeDiane Keaton as Annie Hall <\/p>\n

For all the later association with New York, she was born a southern Californian and retained the laid-back attitude associated with that locale. Raised in middle-class Orange County, she performed at school, eventually making her way to Manhattan and acting classes at the Neighbourhood Playhouse. In 1968 she secured a role as tribe member in the hippie musical Hair. Even now, that show is chiefly remembered for the nakedness of its cast. \u201cI did not take my clothes off,\u201d she told me. \u201cI didn\u2019t need to. It was not worth it. But that was very strange. Then I auditioned for Woody. I didn\u2019t know how I got that. I didn\u2019t understand. Why me?\u201d<\/p>\n

She and Allen were romantically attached for only a brief period, but the professional association lasted for decades after her turn in the theatrical version of Play it Again, Sam. Keaton played it straight in the director\u2019s Bergmanesque Interiors from 1978. She was a flintier version of the Annie type in Manhattan from 1980. As late as 1993, when Mia Farrow, Allen\u2019s then recently estranged partner, departed Manhattan Murder Mystery, Keaton stepped up to take the part.<\/p>\n

\"DianeDiane Keaton on the set of The Godfather. Photograph: Paramount Pictures <\/p>\n

Many fans, with Annie Hall in their heads, saw her role in the Godfather films as uncharacteristic, but Keaton was more surprised at her comic success than at landing the role in Francis Ford Coppola\u2019s epic. \u201cI still don\u2019t know how I got Play it Again, Sam. But I do understand The Godfather,\u201d she said. \u201cI was not quite fully developed. And that woman didn\u2019t have a voice. She was lost in that world. She couldn\u2019t stick up for herself. So maybe I made sense.\u201d<\/p>\n

Maybe so. But she remained most associated with an intelligent strain of all-American Wasp comedy. One of the key scenes in Annie Hall \u2013 lost on most overseas viewers \u2013 has her daring to order \u201cpastrami on white bread with mayonnaise, tomatoes and lettuce\u201d in a famous Jewish deli. <\/p>\n

Yet there was rarely any sense of satirical bite in her performances. Keaton almost always encouraged empathy from audiences. Who would not warm to the hassled matriarch in the 1991 remake of Father of the Bride or the playwright torn between Jack Nicholson and Keanu Reeves in Nancy Myers\u2019s agreeable 2003 hit Something\u2019s Gotta Give? There is a temptation to class her with earlier geniuses in the field of romantic comedy such as Katharine Hepburn or Judy Holliday, but, in truth, nobody had an energy anything like hers. The sappy grin. The eyeroll. The poorly concealed intelligence. That energy aged gracefully as the actor moved triumphantly through the decades. One could hardly imagine a more delightful pairing than her opposite Brendan Gleeson\u2019s eccentric homeless person in Hampstead from 2017. <\/p>\n

\"DianeDiane Keaton and Brendan Gleeson in Hampstead <\/p>\n

She seems to have remained on good terms with all of her famous exes: Allen, Al Pacino, Warren Beatty. No doubt she, like all of us, had her enemies, but she managed to convey an admirable calm to the outside world. \u201cJust be realistic. Right? I think that\u2019s the thing. Right?\u201d she said. And she never married. \u201cNo, no. Never close,\u201d she told me. I suggested she was from a particular generation \u2013 the one that came of age in the 1960s \u2013 that, for a while at least, felt that institution was going out of fashion, but she wasn\u2019t quite buying that theory. \u201cMaybe oddballs didn\u2019t get married. Ha ha!\u201d she retorted.<\/p>\n

That sentence does sit comfortably in an assessment of a career unlike any other. Nobody else generated such affection with such an attractive school of eccentricity. She was a writer, producer and \u2013 one for the trivia fans \u2013 she directed an episode of the original Twin Peaks. Keaton is survived by the two children she adopted in her fifties. That seemed a characteristically surprising and characteristically likeable decision.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was late,\u201d she admitted in 2017. \u201cI had broken up with somebody and I thought: that was my last go round. What are you going to do with your life?\u201d<\/p>\n

She did plenty. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Diane Keaton, who has died in Los Angeles at the age of 79, was the sort of actor…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":116477,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[75],"tags":[71374,18,117,19,17],"class_list":{"0":"post-116476","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-diane-keaton","9":"tag-eire","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-ie","12":"tag-ireland"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116476","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=116476"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116476\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/116477"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=116476"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=116476"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=116476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}