‘I can’t imagine crying about the death of any other actor’
Laura Snapes
Lovable … Keaton in Father of the Bride. Photograph: Touchstone/Allstar
The first person I texted about Diane Keaton’s death was my mum. Our love of her films is pretty much the only cultural taste I inherited from her. I was about 10 when she first let me watch a VHS off the grown-up shelf. She picked Baby Boom. I might wonder what the appeal of a film about a high-flying 80s businesswoman inheriting a baby was to a kid – were it not so plainly funny, spanning Keaton’s talents from screwball to synonymous with comfort, and a curious lens on adult life. My next Keaton was Father of the Bride I and II, which made Keaton – and Steve Martin – feel even more like my movie parents.
As a teenager I got into her Woody Allen roles, but I confess I’ve never seen most of her serious work. Instead, it’s her dalliances with the indignities of ageing – in Book Club, Hampstead – that I watch with my mum and nana. Keaton felt so ingrained in my life, not to mention showing that you can be lovable as a deeply idiosyncratic woman existing outside conventional beauty standards; I can’t imagine crying about the death of any other actor. Last night, mum texted me to say she had just finished Baby Boom and was about to start Something’s Gotta Give. At that exact moment, I was watching the credits roll on the latter.
‘Diane Keaton taught me the power of real world revenge’
Benjamin Lee
Relatably wimpy … Keaton (left), Goldie Hawn and Bette Midler in The First Wives Club. Photograph: Paramount/Allstar
I wasn’t having the best time in 1997. I’d started a new school in a new area and the kids just didn’t take to me (I was gawky, living in what they deemed the wrong side of the tracks and, worst of all, clearly, if not openly, gay). I was an easy target for bullies so I needed to find a way to cope with the barrage and while Carrie was on my rewatch rotation, frustratingly telekinesis wasn’t coming easy (I had stared at so many things for so long but alas). Then we rented out The First Wives Club and Diane Keaton taught me the power of real world revenge. She was a relatably wimpy doormat finding strength in getting her own back and I too found hope in wishing, and quietly planning, for the very worst to happen to those who wronged me. There was something empowering about her embracing and justifying bitter, targeted pettiness, a sap who became a survivor and turned into my unlikely high school mascot. When they went low, I went back to The First Wives Club.
‘I found her irresistible’
Emma Brockes
When I met Diane Keaton 11 years ago in LA, she turned up to the interview fully in role as “Diane Keaton”: that is, as a person of impossible charm and assiduous vagueness – la-di-da – in a bowler hat and fingerless mesh gloves. Keaton was then 68 and still very much in her prime. I found her irresistible, as everyone who met her did, a woman of radical, thrilling, eccentric style in an industry of dull conformists. It took steel to be that way, and around the edges of her persona I thought I could see it. Do you know she made a second income flipping houses? Or that her relationship with Warren Beatty ended because, she wrote in her memoir, “I wanted to be Warren Beatty, not love him”? Celebrity culture didn’t suit her, she told me, because – raise a glass, tip the bowler – “I don’t fit.”
‘She was the dream Boomer’
Catherine Bray
So Diane … Keaton and Jack Nicholson in Something’s Gotta Give (2003). Photograph: Cinematic/Alamy
For a certain cohort of elder millennials and the younger half of Gen X, Diane Keaton was about the same age as your own mother, and for me, she always represented an idealised version of that much-maligned generation, the Boomers. Keaton was the way you want this generation to be: stylish in the 1970s, feminist in the 1980s, hilarious in the 1990s and ageing aspirationally into the new millennium, with Keanu Reeves’ sexy doctor character in Something’s Gotta Give chasing her with lines like: “How great is it for you that I’m not intimidated by your brilliance?” Quite apart from her onscreen roles, she campaigned to protect wildlife, preserve architectural history and was a vocal ally to the LGBTQ+ community. Boomers who wonder why they can’t seem to get it right with their adult kids: be more Diane.
‘She walks on the broken glass of contradictions of what it meant to be a modern woman in the late 70s’
Priya Elan
Ditzy … Keaton in Looking for Mr Goodbar (1977). Photograph: Paramount/Allstar
As a child I fell for Diane Keaton, the comedic ditz. But it wasn’t until recently I discovered her greatest dramatic performance, Looking for Mr Goodbar. Conventionally read as a parable against the single life, the film is really a fascinatingly nuanced look at one person’s attempt to find themselves through their sexuality, navigating the choppy sea to independence and swimming against a tide of societal expectation. Keaton dispenses with her usual comedy tics to play Theresa Dunn, a scoliosis survivor with a deeply enmeshed Catholic family who enters the pre-Aids singles-bar scene in an attempt to find, well, not love per se, but herself. The film de-centres Theresa from the male characters (who are all monstrous) to portray a character walking on the broken glass of contradictions of what it meant to be a modern woman in the late 70s. As the film builds ominously to its chilling climax, you realise you have been watching one of the greatest horror films ever made.
‘I conflated her with my mom’
Richard Lawson
Complex … Keaton in Baby Boom (1987). Photograph: United Artists/Allstar
Of the few VHS tapes my childhood household owned, 1987’s Baby Boom was among the most precious. Charles Shyer’s witty and wistful comedy of interruption – about a greed-is-good 1980s Manhattan businesswoman who is suddenly saddled with a distant relative’s infant daughter – was such a favourite of my professionally accomplished mother that I, as a kid, began to conflate fiction with reality. In financier JC Wyatt’s smart haircut, I saw my mom’s. Ditto JC’s sardonic humour, her occasional fluster, the compassionate humanity lying underneath a tough exterior. In some senses, JC was my mom and thus Diane Keaton was, too. It was only when I got a bit older and saw more of Keaton’s work that I realised what a departure this was for the actor, a chance to play a bit flintier than she normally did. It’s a performance I’ve revisited again and again over the years, first with my family and then on my own.
Baby Boom is a nostalgia vector, to be sure. But it is also a valuable window into the complex talent of a legendary actor often thought of as one thing: a flouncer, a sweet mess, a whimsical dream girl. Those qualities are certainly present in Shyer’s film, gradually teased out as JC’s circumstances realign her priorities. But there is something unique in there, too, a harder facet of Keaton’s ability that I only wish she’d gotten to, or chosen to, explore more of later in her career. At least we’ll always have Baby Boom, with its achingly lovely music underscoring scenes of a woman buckling under dual allegiances, struggling to and then succeeding in finding her own way to have it all – just as Keaton did, just as mom did.
‘She seemed hotter than all the bronzed Barbies’
Amy Fleming
Deftly original … Keaton at the Oscars in 2004. Photograph: Francis Specker/Alamy
I was spellbound by Diane Keaton when I was a tween in the 80s. I would always watch the Woody Allen films she was in when they came on TV – Sleeper, Annie Hall, Manhattan. As a girl yet to experience a romantic relationship, I found them, and especially her, hilarious and fascinating.
What a contrast she was to the women in the TV shows I’d grown up with – The A Team, Wonder Woman, Dukes of Hazzard, Bewitched, Dynasty. She seemed hotter than all of them while dressing androgynously and not showing off bronzed Barbie-doll legs or pouting.
Deftly original, her screen presence felt like permission to be weird, contrary, complicated, funny and so deeply into your own interests as to not be remotely intimidated by or in thrall to verbose, idiotic, self-absorbed men.
‘Her coltish energy was relatable and deeply desirable’
Leslie Felperin
As the child of east coast Jews, I was raised on Woody Allen movies. But that only emphasised how out of sync I felt growing up in California in the 1970s at a time when all the girls aspired to look like Cybill Shepherd, Farrah Fawcett or Suzanne Somers, all assorted shades of ultra-femme blonde. With her menswear borrowings and goofy hats in Annie Hall, Diane Keaton offered a style that was uniquely her own but also eminently copyable for an adolescent girl.
Oddly powerful … Woody Allen and Keaton in Annie Hall (1977). Photograph: United Artists/Allstar
There was something oddly powerful about it too, as if Keaton and all of us young women cloning her style were asserting that we didn’t want to look like the Übermensch power-shiksas the men said they wanted; we wanted to look like the men themselves, the guys who desired Annie in spite of, perhaps because of, all her brittleness, her anhedonia, her performative la-di-da poise. Her coltish energy was relatable and deeply desirable, and you can’t but admire how she evolved that style over the years into something that worked exceedingly well in middle-age, all chunky knitwear and tweed coat – quiet luxury before that was even a phrase.
‘I’m still singing and whooping along to her solo’
Hollie Richardson
I was a daughter of divorce in the 90s; watching The First Wives Club with my mum was a rite of passage. While Goldie and Bette spit out the big laugh lines, Diane’s doormat Annie – “the one who can’t manage a single declarative sentence” – is most relatable in learning to stand up for herself. And it is so satisfying. The “I’m sorry!” she screams at her husband, his new girlfriend and her therapist is just incredible. But, of course, it’s the final scene, where Annie at last gets the guts to do her solo in You Don’t Own Me, that leaves its joyous mark. “Just let me be myself,” she warbles, shaking out her head. The trio, all fabulously dressed in white, join in and spill out on to the street. My mum sent it to me on Saturday, after the news of Diane’s death, and I’m still singing and whooping along to it with a tear in my eye.
‘The scene in Manhattan when she yells at her dog Waffles is an absolute masterclass’
Andrew Pulver
Recognisably human … Woody Allen and Diane Keaton in Manhattan (1979). Photograph: Ronald Grant
Without the sardonic delivery of, say, Tina Fey or Sarah Silverman, Diane Keaton was, in retrospect, a tiny bit overmatched in Woody Allen’s “early, funny” comedies; Allen, after all, had some claim to be the funniest human being ever during his early 70s pomp. But if her gag delivery was a little shaky, she more than made up for it with her brilliant acting chops, able to inhabit roles with great skill: you totally believed she was a ditsy future-world poetess addicted to the Orb, or a Russian maiden unhappily married to a herring merchant. She really came into her own as Allen’s films evolved into fully conceived comedy-dramas, with their fully rounded and recognisably human characters, rather than blizzards of skits. Annie Hall suited her well – it seems you could hardly get a cigarette paper between Annie and Keaton’s real-life persona – but Manhattan, her last Allen film until a brief cameo in Radio Days, may be her most accomplished performance. Her character, emotionally needy journalist Mary Wilkie, is introduced superbly, intimidating Allen’s Isaac with a rapid-fire critique of the art show they are visiting (“It was perfectly integrated and it had a marvellous kind of negative capability. The rest of the stuff downstairs was bullshit!”); and the scene in which she simultaneously argues with Michael Murphy’s Yale, fields a call from even more emotionally needy therapist Donny, and yells at her dog Waffles is just an absolute masterclass. Her later comedies were fun, for sure, but never match up to this.
‘Keaton fought for, and won, the right to be smart and creative, screwed-up and restless’
Charlotte O’Sullivan
Angsty … Allen and Keaton in Annie Hall. Photograph: United Artists/Allstar
Keaton doesn’t make a single duff move in Annie Hall, Woody Allen’s zippy, raw ode to doomed love. But she’s especially awesome in the bit where fidgety heroine, Annie, has an out-of-body experience. It’s been established that wannabe singer Annie routinely gets stoned before having intercourse with comedian boyfriend, Alvy (Allen) and that these days, even when high, Annie is finding Alvy less likely to float her boat than sink it. Here, the couple are on holiday in the Hamptons, and a typically hot-to-trot Alvy demands she ditch the drugs. Once sprawled on top of her, he remarks “You seem sorta distant”. When Annie mutters, “I’m fine!” you can all but picture her gritted teeth.
Soon her ghost-like inner self is padding out of the bed, sitting on a chair and drawling, “Alvy, do you remember where I put my drawing pad? Because while you two are doing that, I think I’m gonna do some drawing.” Allen is king of zingers, but Keaton more than holds her own by being nakedly real. Keaton lets her shoulders get slumpy. Her voice sounds almost whiny. Meanwhile, watch the expression on the face of her “ghost”. Annie slips from looking stern, to indulgent, and finally (once she remembers her beloved drawing pad) ecstatic. Annie is clearly in a funk and Keaton, with great skill, puts us inside this character’s teeming brain. It’s been said that in Annie Hall the actor isn’t doing a whole lot, because she’s just being herself. What hooey!
Annie laid the groundwork for a bunch of other frazzled females on a herky-jerky quest for meaning. Elaine from Seinfeld. Clementine from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Frances Ha. Fleabag. Insecure’s Issa Dee. It’s not about where these women live (though many of them do crash around NYC), it’s about a state of mind. Keaton fought for, and won, the right to be smart and creative, screwed-up and restless. Angsty Hall. That Keaton was allowed to bring this magnificently awkward character to life – and that her performance continues to have a cultural impact – makes me happy beyond words.
‘A movie star who was entirely like that in real life’
Catherine Shoard
My half an hour on the phone with Diane Keaton two years ago could have been quite stressful. There was a delay on the line, she’d asked for topics in advance but hadn’t read them, she only wanted to talk about doors anyway and then her dog vomited up a rock.
Yet I was left totally beaming. Keaton was wildly nice. I’ve never been complimented so much in 30 minutes. But she was also responsive, curious, quick, surprising (read: all over the shop), warm but not soft (called herself a bitch for having a black Mercedes, was rigorously puritanical about victim culture). Unless it was about dogs – then she was hypnotically soppy.
In-the-moment … Keaton attends a Lakers game in Los Angeles with Jack Nicholson in 2003. Photograph: Vince Bucci/Getty Images
These qualities have substantial overlap with her movie persona (at least the comedy one – she was also a skilled actor who played loads of prickly people) – and are why everyone loved her. But it was a unique experience to meet a movie star who was just entirely like that in real life. She also seemed, I should say, really cheerful – which tracks. Note how different to her peers she looks on that iconic Vanity Fair cover, not only in terms of surgery and swaddle, but smile.
Outside small children, Keaton was the most in-the-moment and bracingly unreflective person I’ve ever met. Maybe this spontaneity had something to do with why she was quite so magnetic on screen, as well as great company on the blower. I think that interview was the last one she did. I’m beyond honoured – and very sad.
