“I mean, do I really care if a handful of my poems are read after I’m gone forever? Is that supposed to be some kind of compensation? I used to think it was. Now, for some reason…I can’t seem to shake the real implication of dying,” says Diane Keaton to her unseen therapist, to us, in 1978’s “Interiors.” She’s red-eyed from tears and gripping a cigarette like a life raft. When she’s on screen, she’s the entire movie. That was how it was, even during her last buddy comedies in her final years of life.
Along with “The Godfather” and “Looking for Mr. Goodbar.” “Interiors” was one of her deadly serious 1970s pictures. She wasn’t often called upon to play things completely straight. But her gift was knowing how to take a writer’s construct and make her so specific you can hear her laugh in your sleep, and—more to the point—know exactly how she dresses.
Though tributes from the likes of Goldie Hawn, Bette Midler, Viola Davis, and Al Pacino have already come pouring in, there was really only one remembrance of Keaton I knew I had to read: Stephanie Zacharek’s. The critic for Time, she and Keaton both represent something vanishingly rare in their respective industries: style. Stephanie, a million-dollar dresser herself, once interrupted an Olivier Assayas roundtable with a question about Chanel, for which some of the women in the audience thanked her. I knew she had to have seen in Diane Keaton an aspirational figure and lo:
“Keaton’s…style represented limitless possibilities, and a previously incomprehensible kind of freedom. Today, nearly everyone is hip to the power of thrifting, but in the ’70s, mixing and matching used clothes made you part of a secret society, and Keaton was our clubhouse president. […] There are lots of great actresses who dress beautifully, but in the modern day, nearly all of them use stylists. They may know what they like—when they’re presented with gowns and outfits, they’re perfectly equipped to say yes or no—but you rarely get the sense that what they’re wearing is a true expression of who they are.”
Keaton never seemed to fret over how she was perceived. She took palpable glee in dressing herself and, in so doing, inspired one generation after another to walk their own path.
Jack Nicholson’s easiest barbs in “Something’s Gotta Give” are about her clothes, specifically her turtleneck sweaters. As Zacharek points out in her eulogy, Keaton started wearing them after a battle with skin cancer. Her director, Nancy Meyers, loved her and wanted to capture her joie de vivre and beauty as only a friend could. She and husband Charles Shyer met Keaton after having quarreled with their first muse, Keaton’s “First Wives Club” co-star Goldie Hawn. They made “Baby Boom” together in 1987, then two “Father of the Bride” movies. Meyers saw in Keaton the strength of her early work and the real spark she had to conceal in her tragedies. Hawn called it “fairy dust.”
Whatever it was, her pictures grossed more than a billion dollars over her 55-year career, even as her types of dramas and comedies became broadly unpopular. She made a lot more movies you haven’t seen than ones you have, is my guess, and yet I believe in my heart of hearts that no one reading this has a bad word to say about her.
What I think most impresses about Diane Keaton—aside from her sartorial singularity, which colored her idiosyncrasy as a movie star—is that she never ran from the business, even as it was turning on its women. In the 1970s, she turned a career as a light comedian and Broadway star into a life as a screen ingenue, handily sharing films with heavy hitters like Al Pacino, Marlon Brando, and John Cazale. She took a square look at second and third Wave Feminism, refusing to be a sex symbol on anyone’s terms but her own, projecting strength and ambition and an ingratiating, flighty charm. She was shoulder to shoulder with other performers marching to their own beat like Sigourney Weaver, Sally Field, Jill Klayburgh, and Meryl Streep.
She then slotted herself into the ‘90s trends of romantic comedies and social dramas, always standing out, always centering the experience of women approaching menopause. Then she managed to continue leading comedies, such as the delightful “Morning Glory” and her final film to date, “Summer Camp,” for the last twenty years of her career.
She was always in the spotlight, but she never chased it. It came to her, and she wore it like one of her chapeaus or fanciful eyeglasses. She represented a kind of mainstream progressivism in the film industry that, at times, was bracing in its honesty. Her movies were for everyone, and she took that responsibility seriously without breaking a sweat.
She was born Diane Hall but changed it to Keaton when she joined Actors’ Equity, as it was already taken. High school plays led to college acting classes, then a move to New York to sing in a cabaret act by night and understudy for Broadway shows by day, including the 1968 original run (other replacement cast members included Keith Carradine and Meat Loaf).
Her break, in a few ways, came when she auditioned to play Woody Allen’s love interest in his “Play it Again, Sam.” Allen may have ended up the villain in his own story, but he must be given credit for having given Keaton to the world. They reprised their roles in the 1972 film version of “Sam,” though Keaton’s first role was in the forgotten ethnic farce “Lovers and Other Strangers.” Allen would cast her as his foil in “Sleeper” and “Love and Death” as she began working with Francis Ford Coppola on the “Godfather” movies. She was involved with various co-stars, including Allen, Pacino, and Warren Beatty, for years at a time, though she never married.
Coppola had liked Keaton’s quirky turn in “Lovers” and wanted that to come out of Kay, written as a hapless witness to her fiancé’s journey into darkness. She’s not billed near the top, but it’s her scenes that take us into and out of the film. As she sits watching Michael Corleone’s family and hangers-on mill about a wedding, she keeps asking questions with a slowly fading smile about everyone’s identity and job. By the end, she knows that there are murderers at every table, though Michael assures her that he is not one of them. He closes the door between them so he can conduct the business of murder himself. Now she’s the one who must say that this way of life is her family’s, but not hers.
In the second “Godfather,” it’s her late movie confession that forever closes that door between them. She may be trapped with him, but she needs him to be trapped, too, so he’ll know her pain, even if he won’t release her from it.
After two forgotten Elliott Gould comedies, Allen gave her a gift that changed film forever. A character study about a murdered woman (though that plot device would be famously left on the cutting room floor) and the boyfriend who remembers her. Her name was also Keaton’s. Diane Hall became Annie Hall.
The film was Allen’s first foray into something more reflective after having lampooned Ingmar Bergman and Tolstoy, and it’s Keaton who makes it all make sense. She’s effervescent, even as she’s mannered and a little cruel (Allen’s neuroses are mostly kept in check, as he tries and fails to replace this woman who so captivated him). She won her only Oscar for the performance, and to this day, a hat, a vest, slacks, and a white button-down is a look only associated with her character, the first signature Diane Keaton look.
She would all but reprise the role in “Manhattan,” and then Allen would take her with him when his pastiche of Bergman became a full-on impression for “Interiors.” If Allen made her immortal, she made him a respected director.
The curveballs came fast after her Oscar win. First was veteran director Richard Brooks’ “Looking for Mr. Goodbar,” which wants to be a cautionary tale about promiscuity, but Keaton keeps making it about the new freedoms of womanhood in a time slowly thawing from rigid misogyny. She dates and sleeps around, Brooks argues, as almost a social experiment, to decompress after her day job at a school for the Deaf lets out, and to flee the confines of her orthodox family.
Keaton doesn’t allow the part to be defined by impulse but instead by curiosity and the need for sensual expression. Her screaming matches with her father linger as much as her risky sex scenes with a raft of strangers, one of whom will violently kill her seconds before the end credits.
She spent the ’80s investigating her own politics and image in carefully chosen films, providing a different sort of role model for her viewers. In Warren Beatty’s “Reds,” she plays the political journalist Louise Bryant, whose earnest sympathy for revolutionary Russia earned her a reputation and a brief marriage to firebrand organizer John Reed (Beatty). The stars bounce off each other with the energy of teenagers.
In a conversation for The Criterion Channel, Ethan Hawke and Vincent D’Onofrio compared some of her line readings to the Meisner exercises she would have practiced in her early days at the Neighborhood Playhouse. (“Why don’t you come?” “What as? What as? …I mean what as?” “It’s almost Thanksgiving, why don’t you come as a turkey?”) Beatty’s eyes were on the revolution. Keaton’s beautiful twitching pupils are affixed on the present.
Her second epic of the decade, Gillian Armstrong’s “Mrs. Soffel,” finds her as a devout prison warden’s wife who falls for a godless prisoner and helps him escape. This role makes perfect sense as a woman wracked by passion, similar to her portrayal in the willful Annie Hall. The film has sadly lost all its cachet, but it’s a marvel, the Australian artist’s answer to “Once Upon a Time in America.” “Why would God give us this short life with all of its troubles and not give us a better one afterwards?”
Unlike Allen’s, Keaton’s spiritual quest was firsthand, sincere, and she played it out in her work. She directed her first film, the documentary “Heaven” in 1987, featuring interviews with everyone from Rajneeshi swamis to boxing promoter Don King about the afterlife. It was not a hit, nor were any of her directorial works. She’d directed a series of music videos for Go-Gos frontwoman Belinda Carlisle, some TV, and three more movies, about family trauma. George Roy Hill’s “Little Drummer Girl” is about an actress drafted into Mossad.
In “Sister Mary Explains It All” and “The Young Pope,” she plays a nun. In many films (“Marvin’s Room“, “Poms,” “The Family Stone”), she’s dying and looking to find the meaning of life, or she magically ages (“Mack & Rita,“ “Arthur’s Whiskey”) to do the same. She wanted to understand her place in the universe, especially when she was confronted with her own cancer and the adoption of her two boys. She may have spent her last decades making light comedies with a coterie of close friends (Beatty, Meyers, Steve Martin, Robert De Niro, Richard Gere), but she never let women her age become the butt of the joke.
The later years were lined with major achievements and minor comedies. 1987’s “Baby Boom” honestly looked at the work-life balance of an advertising executive. Meyers and Shyer put a female face on the job usually handled by Michael J. Fox, James Spader, Michael Douglas, and Charlie Sheen. She was on the cover of the first issue of Premiere Magazine, holding her infant co-star.
The search for life’s meaning is honest, if buried under a lot of juvenile humor (though good grief, watch the way she swings that baby around in the first act; that is what you call risking it all for a laugh). When she’s offered a chance at compromising riches after having been fired from her job, she turns it down. “I don’t wanna make those sacrifices, and nobody should have to!” Shyer frames her in front of dark marble and gold bars, emphasizing the gilded cage she’s giving up and her isolation, as if she were on a stage or a movie character. This was a Keaton heroine for the ages.
She returned for “The Godfather III,” now decked out in her own wardrobe next to a graying Pacino. Her performance in Alan Parker’s shockingly serious “Shoot the Moon” should have netted her and co-star Albert Finney much more attention and plaudits, as they help the film overcome its schematic misery. Ditto her work in “Marvin’s Room,” where she became one of the few co-stars who ever upstaged Meryl Streep.
“The First Wives Club” became a sensation, spawning a musical and a TV show. In “Something’s Gotta Give,” she literally bares it all as a playwright in her autumn years. She and Jack Nicholson, who had once played lovers in “Reds,” have a beautiful shared language born of their advanced years. Perhaps the finest moment in the film finds the pair silently having a conversation as Keaton’s daughter, Amanda Peet, walks around the two of them, complaining about her day.
That’s not just talent, that’s trust, and these two titans could look at each other and share the story of 60 years of life without blinking. It’s deeply moving work, and the film rises to earn it. She and a host of co-stars (Jane Fonda, Jeremy Irons, John Goodman, Harrison Ford) would soon tell similarly unforced tales of getting old.
Keaton made loving fodder of every step of her journey, becoming an artist whose autobiography is written across nearly 70 films. Her true excitement at being able to do her favorite job for a living has made her a legend, even if it was her outfits that made her an icon. She’s gone now, but we’ll be reading her poetry forever.
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