Diane Keaton has said that she felt miscast in The Godfather. The movie, her second, offers compelling evidence that she wasn’t. But that note of self-questioning honesty, familiar to anyone who has seen her interviewed or read her memoirs, is also essential to her distinctive work as an actor, whether she’s spoofing it up in a wacky satire, bringing a historical figure to full-blooded life or exploring the recognizable challenges of parenthood and marriage.
Her turn as Kay Adams-Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 saga (her second big-screen role after Lovers and Other Strangers) introduced many moviegoers to the singular mix of intellect and heart, innocence and yearning that has infused dozens of roles over the past 45 years. She would go on to play stronger women than Kay, and funnier ones, but something of Kay informs many of those performances: She’s a non-Sicilian in a Mafia clan, a Baptist among Catholics, a woman in a man’s world. She’s the outsider looking in.
Keaton’s discerning gaze is evident in her trend-resistant sense of personal style, her work as a photographer and some of her decidedly off-the-beaten-track choices as a director (the documentary Heaven) and producer (Gus Van Sant’s Elephant). But it’s also a key part of what sets her apart as a movie star. Even when her characters are at their most rash or ridiculous, there’s a core of piercing insight; we know that, beneath it all, she’s sensible.
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And even when she’s playing a woman who’s quite clearly grounded, Keaton infuses the simplest exchange with shades of emotion, as in her recent work opposite Morgan Freeman in 5 Flights Up. Delving into the long-term and moment-to-moment negotiations of a good marriage, she delivers one of her loveliest performances.
There’s never anything capital-A actorly about Keaton’s work, but rather a remarkably unforced presence and a generosity toward her fellow actors, whether she’s sparring romantically with Jack Nicholson in Something’s Gotta Give or playing sympathetic aunt to a teenage Leonardo DiCaprio in Marvin’s Room — both performances that were nominated for Academy Awards. She doesn’t need to stake a claim on center stage, even when she’s playing the title character — the immortal Annie Hall — in a movie that’s a valentine to her talent and spirit. She draws us in effortlessly.
Making comedy look easy, notably in her celebrated collaborations with Woody Allen and, later, with Nancy Meyers, Keaton has brightened everything from satires torom-coms to the category-defying crowd-pleaser First Wives Club, in which she formed a powerhouse trio with Goldie Hawn and Bette Midler.
But though she’s one of the screen’s greatest comic actors, Keaton has long taken risks with serious material that demands more of the audience. Early in her career, there was her harrowing walk on the wild side in Looking for Mr. Goodbar. Later, she stepped to the helm for the thoroughly unorthodox Heaven. And as she demonstrated earlier this year with her uncompromising turn as Sister Mary in HBO’s darkly trippy limited series The Young Pope, Keaton is a daring performer who’s still evolving, and still taking chances.
'Annie Hall' (1977)
Keaton had already made three movies with Woody Allen before this 1977 gem, a turning point in both their careers and a landmark in American comedy. Her Oscar-winning turn in the title role, which Allen wrote for her, captivated coming-of-age baby boomers. Someone else might have pulled off the hemming and hawing, the vintage menswear and la-di-da’s, but it’s hard to imagine just who that might be, or that they’d do so with such warmth and spark. The word “iconic” is tossed around a lot; Keaton’s Annie Hall is the real deal.
'Shoot the Moon' (1982)
In director Alan Parker's exquisitely sharp and tender portrait of marital dissolution, Keaton and Albert Finney navigate their characters’ shifting relationship with wariness, venom and bursts of bittersweet love. Bo Goldman’s screenplay gave Keaton one of her most complex and demanding roles. Faith Dunlap is fed-up ex-wife, nimble wrangler of a spirited quartet of daughters, and tentative new girlfriend. It’s a performance of quicksilver nuance and breathtaking depth.
'Reds' (1981)
Keaton received her second Oscar nomination for her portrayal of journalist Louise Bryant, who traded bourgeois comfort for bohemia and radical politics. The character she creates in Warren Beatty’s masterwork about American leftists and the Russian Civil War is the essence of convention-defying modernity and independence, and all the more fascinating for her off-putting contradictions.
'The Godfather: Part II' (1974)
Having at last faced the fact that her Mafia boss husband, Michael Corleone (Al Pacino), will never go legit, Keaton’s Kay tells him the brutal truth about their marriage. The scene, with its scalding emotional and physical violence, has rightly become one of the most famous in a movie with no shortage of powerful moments. But watch Keaton in an earlier sequence, when Kay, seated behind Michael while he lies to a Senate committee, has to put on a public face. Without a word and barely a move, she shows us a woman who’s frantic to escape.
'Looking for Mr. Goodbar' (1977)
Released just six months after Annie Hall, Richard Brooks’ adaptation of Judith Rossner’s best-selling novel took Keaton about as far from comic romance and kooky sweetness as you could go in a mainstream Hollywood film. As a committed schoolteacher who dabbles in danger with menacing bar pickups (played by newcomers Richard Gere and Tom Berenger), Keaton never panders to audience sympathy as she digs beneath the film’s lurid surface and her troubled character’s emotional armor.
