Diane Keaton: Remembering a Beautiful, Kooky yet Canny Star

The actress, whose death was announced Saturday, crafted a wide-ranging but approachable persona through films like ‘Annie Hall,’ ‘Reds’ and ‘The Godfather.’

Diane Keaton’s combination of beauty and kookiness won the actress her only Oscar, but the job was easy: She said the title role in “Annie Hall” was “an affable version of myself.”

Diane Keaton: Remembering a Beautiful, Kooky yet Canny Star

There was little doubt of that: Ms. Keaton, whose death at age 79 was announced Saturday, was born Diane Hall (Keaton was her mother’s maiden name; the actress changed hers because there was another Diane Hall in the actors’ union)—and the film, one of the most beautifully textured and genuinely felt romcoms ever made, was a thinly fictionalized version of her life dating Woody Allen, with whom she lived for several years. Mr. Allen said that bringing her to the attention of the public by casting her in a leading role in “Play It Again, Sam,” his 1969 play (later reprised for the screen in 1972), was his proudest achievement. Ms. Keaton had only recently gotten her first role on the New York stage (after college in her native Southern California) as an understudy in “Hair,” the 1968 hippie musical, but “Play It Again, Sam” showed off her talents as an irrepressible comic leading lady. Many other collaborations with Mr. Allen would provide her with some of her other greatest roles, such as a poet in the Ingmar Bergman homage “Interiors” and the fractious intellectual in “Manhattan” (1979).

The same year “Annie Hall” came out, 1977, Ms. Keaton proved her range in a part shot through with bitterness and self-hatred, in Richard Brooks’s searing drama “Looking for Mr. Goodbar,” inspired by the true story of a New York schoolteacher’s sexual odyssey that ended in her murder.

Ms. Keaton’s elegant looks, warm laugh, broad smile, her canny intelligence and broad streak of whimsy made her as sought-after offscreen as on. Though she never married or gave birth—she adopted two children in her 50s—she famously dated Warren Beatty, while filming his historical epic “Reds,” for which she received an Oscar nomination as the writer Louise Bryant; and Al Pacino, more than a decade after they had first worked together as Kay and Michael Corleone in “The Godfather.” In his memoir, “Sonny Boy,” Mr. Pacino credited her with reviving his career in the 1980s by drawing his attention to the script for a cop drama, “Sea of Love.”

Together the pair created some of the most piercing moments in two of the greatest movies ever made. Ms. Keaton’s Kay, an outsider to the Corleone family, carries the burden of being the films’ sole moral voice, the only one who rejects the Mafia’s twisted and bloody codes. It’s because of Ms. Keaton’s explosive anger that one of the most affecting deaths in any of the “Godfather” films is one we don’t even witness: In “The Godfather Part II,” she angrily informs her husband that she hadn’t miscarried their son: “It was an abortion, Michael, just like our marriage is an abortion . . . And I had it killed because this must all end.” Kay was a lone beacon in the fog of murder and evil. The look of desperate resignation on her face as Michael’s crew closes the door on her at the end of the first “Godfather” was the antidote to the look of icy determination on his face. And yet in between the two films she gave as delightfully ditzy a performance as you’ll ever see in Mr. Allen’s futurist comedy “Sleeper.”

Many actresses find offers drying up when they hit their 40s, but if anything Ms. Keaton became even more popular in the second half of her life, with a string of light romcoms that began with the comedy “Baby Boom” (1987). No longer was she on hand to offer support to men; she proved that she could be to moviegoers what Jack Nicholson’s Eugene O’Neill called her character in “Reds”: “the center of attention.” Ms. Keaton’s sharp-toothed management consultant turned reluctant and semi-competent mother (she is saddled with a baby after a distant relative dies) made for as important an entry in the history of working-woman movies as Dolly Parton’s secretary in “9 to 5” seven years earlier: Her frazzled character neatly merged her two interests when she started a gourmet baby-food company, becoming her own boss and making a fortune in the process.

Diane Keaton as Kay Adams in ‘The Godfather.’

That and other glossy tales of comfortable upper-middle-class life Ms. Keaton made with the writer-director Nancy Meyers were some of her biggest hits: 1991’s “Father of the Bride” (which yielded two sequels) and 2003’s “Something’s Gotta Give,” which earned her a fourth Oscar nomination despite having none of the gravitas that such an honor usually demands. Ms. Keaton simply radiated likability by never seeming to be full of herself; in Newsweek Ms. Meyers called her “the most self-deprecating person alive.” Ms. Keaton said in Vulture in 2020 that the “Bride” movies were her favorite collaborations with Ms. Meyers.

Ms. Keaton’s la-di-da breeziness was one of her most sneakily beguiling qualities; she came across as the best friend you’d love to confide in because you knew she didn’t hold herself higher than you. When Ariana Grande told her she was “so f—ing iconic,” in Interview magazine in 2021, she demurred, self-deprecating as ever: “I don’t really see it that way. I live with myself and I’m hardly iconic. I get up in the morning and it’s me again. I’m just another person saying, ‘Gee, I’d better feed the dog.’”

Mr. Smith is the Journal’s film critic.