I Already Miss Diane Keaton

1946 - 2025

Diane Keaton is dead. I’ll always struggle to accept this.

My earliest memory of Keaton is probably the TV ads for her 1987 movie Baby Boom, her first collaboration with writer/director Nancy Meyers. It’s a distinctly 1980s movie, with Keaton as a workaholic Manhattan business consultant who finds fulfillment raising a baby she “inherited” from her long-lost cousin. The poster for the film features Keaton, dressed in a very smart business suit, holding the baby in one arm while carrying a briefcase with the other. She’s slightly off-balance, showing how this unexpected child has disrupted her once highly structured life. Thirteen-year-old me fell in love with Keaton from this poster alone. I wouldn’t actually see the movie itself for another decade. (Life was very different pre-streaming, when you had to rely on what Blockbuster or your indie video store had in stock.)

---

---

I didn’t realize in 1987 how much of a departure Baby Boom was for Keaton, who played an uptight yuppie known as the “Tiger Lady,” but one random night in 1991, I stumbled upon a TV airing of 1977’s Annie Hall. My love grew beyond that single poster.

Reportedly, the costumer designer for Annie Hall had prepared a glamorous but traditional wardrobe for Keaton’s titular character, but Keaton wisely rejected it.

“This isn’t Annie,” she said, and that wasn’t simply a fashion statement (although she did set a trend). Keaton understood her character and what made her unique. She showed up on set in her own clothes — a loose men’s tie, a rumpled vest, baggy khakis, and a wide-brimmed hat.

“This is who she is,” she insisted. “She’s not trying to be perfect. She’s trying to be herself.”

Writer/Director Woody Allen based Annie Hall on Keaton (born Diane Hall), though obviously through his own limited perspective. Keaton gave life and unwritten depth to Annie. She might’ve started on the page as a prop for Allen’s Alvy Singer, but Keaton isn’t so easily constrained.

Alvy Singer is a terrible person and worse boyfriend. He’s elitist, rigid, and self-obsessed. Alvy’s courtship of Annie is classic “negging” — emotional manipulation through backhanded compliments intended to undermine the target’s confidence. Alvy mansplains Sylvia Plath to Annie during their first meeting, which should have ensured there wasn’t a second one. He suggests that Annie take adult education classes and seek therapy, and when she actually makes progress in both areas, he’s openly resentful. He has no respect for her interests that don’t correlate with his own: He buys her books about death, which he says she should read instead of “that cat book.” He mocks her for attending a rock concert (hardly an atypical activity for a woman from her generation). Beneath the surface of a classic romantic comedy is the story of a woman who breaks free from a controlling, emotionally abusive partner. My favorite moment is when Annie sings “Seems Like Old Times,” and it’s clear from her confident performance that she’s outgrown the toxic Alvy. It’s not romantic. It’s emancipation. (Watch below.)

Keaton would win an Oscar for Annie Hall, and it’s possible the Academy was also recognizing her work from the same year’s Looking For Mr. Goodbar, based on Judith Rossner’s best-selling 1975 novel. It’s a darker, more intense performance in a movie I’ve only been able to watch once.

Keaton is also amazing in 1979’s Manhattan, where she commands every scene as the neurotic cultural snob Mary Wilkie. Keaton’s not playing a caricature, though. She gives Mary humanity and vulnerability. I saw this film for the first time at the University of Georgia’s Tate Theater in October 1992, and although I now realize the film itself is a moral dumpster fire, I desperately wanted to hang out at Elaine’s with Keaton’s Mary. Later, after living in New York, I’d meet people like Mary and find them far less charming in person. Mary tells Allen’s character, “I say what’s on my mind and, if you can’t take it, well then fuck off!” This was one of the few times I’d heard “fuck” uttered out loud.

Keaton was a major presence in 1970s cinema. She played Kay Adams-Corleone in 1972’s The Godfather and 1974’s The Godfather Part II. Keaton’s face is the last image we see in The Godfather before the screen cuts to black, and without a single word, she conveys the true tragedy behind Michael Corleone’s apparent triumph. Keaton is her most formidable when she tells Michael in The Godfather Part II that she’s had an abortion.

Between The Godfather films, Keaton delivered inspired comedic performances in 1973’s Sleeper and 1975’s Love and Death — both peak examples of what is usually described as Allen’s “early, funny films.” Allen has admitted that his comedic persona is a riff on Bob Hope, but Keaton was truly an original. In many ways, she’s like the classic screwball comedy heroines from the 1930s and 1940s, but Allen is hardly Cary Grant or Clark Gable. No, Keaton was often more Bing Crosby to Allen’s Bob Hope or Dean Martin to his Jerry Lewis. Yet, she was too naturally funny to be a straight man. Allen just told jokes or delivered cultural references posing as punchlines. Keaton was Keaton. No matter what you think of Allen, please watch Keaton work her magic in these early films. Love and Death in particular is a movie I watched constantly after recording it on A&E in 1991. She’s a delight.

Keaton would stretch herself creatively throughout the 1980s. She directed the documentary Heaven and even an episode of Twin Peaks, which is admittedly a very Diane Keaton-type series.

Aside from a cameo in 1987’s Radio Days, Keaton wouldn’t work with Allen again after Manhattan until 1993’s Manhattan Murder Mystery. She replaced his former partner Mia Farrow for reasons that are well-known and shouldn’t dominate a piece about Keaton. Farrow has many talents but she was never the comedic actress Keaton was. Farrow was also a more traditional leading lady, whereas Keaton was a mine of quirkiness that always felt authentic and never forced. “I’m an oddball,” she told People magazine in 2019, when explaining why she never married. “I remember in high school, this guy came up to me and said, ‘One day you’re going to make a good wife.’ And I thought, ‘I don’t want to be a wife. No.’”

Manhattan Murder Mystery is probably the one Allen film I still rewatch, and that’s primarily because of Keaton (and co-star Alan Alda). It’s also one of the rare Allen films where his character actually grows slightly. The final scene showcases Keaton’s quick wit. Her last line is an ad lib that elicits a genuine response from Allen. She was always funnier.

I admit losing track of Keaton somewhat during the 1990s. I never watched the Father of the Bride movies, but I did catch The First Wives Club on a late-night bus ride from New York to Boston. It occurs to me now how it’s sort of a WASP version of Waiting to Exhale.

Famous for her self-deprecation, Keaton had stated in a 1992 interview that “it was over” for her as a leading lady in movies. (She was just 46 at the time!) I was glad to see her proven wrong in 2003’s Something’s Gotta Give, where she plays opposite Jack Nicholson (and briefly dates Keanu Reeves). The Nancy Meyers film was an unqualified hit, grossing $266 million worldwide (about $458 million in 2025 dollars). That’s almost unheard of these days for a romantic comedy. Meyers wrote the script, so it’s a “no negging zone” with an actual adult relationship.

I love what Keaton said about her nude scene in Something’s Gotta Give: “At this point, does it really matter? Nobody is looking at me the way I once imagined people would look at me, like with deviant thoughts. I think they just go, ‘Huh. There it is. Intact.’”

Keaton continued to work regularly over the next 20 years. Her final film before her passing was 2024’s Summer Camp, which wasn’t well-reviewed but I’ll probably watch it anyway. I just miss her, and no matter which film I watch, if Diane Keaton’s in it, it’ll feel like old times.