DIANE KEATON
(5 January 1946 – 11 October 2025)
Diane Keaton, who has died aged 79 from squamous cell cancer, was a performer who, like Mae West, Jean Harlow and Marilyn Monroe, defined an era for themselves. Although she had appeared in films from 1970, it was in 1977 when Annie Hall gave audiences a new kind of heroine, a free-wheeling, amusing and simply funny kook, a description that might have been invented just for her. It was a role written specifically for Keaton by Woody Allen and Marshall Brickman, perhaps based on Allen’s experience of working with the actress on previous occasions. Woody also starred in Annie Hall, playing the comedian Alvy Singer who meets the eponymous Annie in a cinema queue. When they get together she appears not to be interested in sex, and instead they talk about his failure with his first two wives. However, they do get on, have fun together and eventually become an item. Their subsequent relationship is difficult and matters get worse as they are both highly neurotic. Although it is Allen’s film, his invention of Annie gave Keaton her big chance and she ran away with it. The comedy was immensely popular, winning four out of its five Oscar nominations, including best picture, screenplay and actress, plus four Baftas and a Golden Globe for Keaton. The film made the AFI list of 100 Greatest Films in American Cinema while the Library of Congress preserved it in the National Film Registry.
Before Annie Hall Keaton had worked first on Cy Howard’s romcom Lovers and Other Strangers in 1970 and was then cast as Kay Adams in The Godfather as well as three other films with Woody Allen – Play It Again, Sam, Sleeper and Love and Death.
Diane Keaton was born in Los Angeles to the real estate broker and civil engineer John Hall and his wife, housewife and amateur photographer Dorothy. Diane was so inspired by her mother’s appearance in a beauty pageant that she wanted to become an actress like her heroine Katharine Hepburn. She graduated in 1963 from Santa Ana High School and College where she had taken part in singing and acting, including playing Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire. She dropped out of college and, using her mother’s maiden name of Keaton, joined Actors’ Equity. After her film debut she worked on some television series and commercials before making her breakthrough in The Godfather in 1972 and then in The Godfather Part II as the girlfriend and eventual wife of Michael Corleone played by Al Pacino (her on-and-off boyfriend at the time).
She was equally at home playing either dramatic or comic roles and she eventually became an actress for all reasons. Annie Hall really made her name, after which she was in Richard Brooks’s Looking for Mr Goodbar as a teacher and dangerous habitué of bars and clubs chasing dates that ended in misery. The cast included Tuesday Weld, William Atherton and Richard Gere. An unsavoury but successful film.
Woody Allen veered between comedy and drama in his other projects with Keaton – Play It Again, Sam, Interiors, Manhattan, Radio Days and Manhattan Murder Mystery. In all they made eight films together. Diane Keaton also appeared in nearly eighty films and TV programmes, as well as projects which she produced and/or directed. Her many outstanding performances include her Oscar-nominated role as the activist Louise Bryant in Warren Beatty’s Reds, about John Reed the October Revolution journalist, Alan Parker’s Shoot the Moon with Albert Finney, The Little Drummer Girl from the book by John Le Carré, Gillian Armstrong’s Mrs Sofel, Bruce Beresford’s Crimes of the Heart, her own-directed Unstrung Heroes, and Nancy Meyers’ Something’s Gotta Give, the latter a romcom with Jack Nicholson for which she won a Golden Globe. Her last two films in 2024 were Arthur’s Whisky, with Patricia Hodge and Lulu, made for Sky Cinema, and Summer Camp, a comedy with Kathy Bates and Alfre Woodard. Keaton worked occasionally on television including ten episodes of The Young Pope with Jude Law, directed by Paolo Sorrentino. She was also one of the voices on twenty episodes of the animated comedy Green Eggs and Ham.
Apart from a long and very successful film career she also worked on stage and was in the original Broadway production of the musical Hair in 1968. She was nominated for a Tony in the Broadway production of Allen’s Play It Again, Sam and received the honour of an AFI Life Achievement Award in 2007. Her private life included relationships with Woody Allen, Pacino and Warren Beatty but she never married. She adopted two children in her fifties, a daughter, Dexter Keaton, and a son, Duke Keaton.
MICHAEL DARVELL