My love for the movie Annie Hall is well-documented. Diane Keaton is wonderful in it. I always appreciated the fact that Diane’s given last name was Hall, so all those references about Grammy Hall seemed more genuine. La-de-dah, la-de-dah.
Yet, I remain convinced that, though she won the Academy Award for Best Actress in the Woody Allen film, she was picked as much for the much darker film from 1977, Waiting for Mr. Goodbar. Or, at least, it added to her “body of work” that year that allowed an actress in a comedy to win an Oscar.
Her first claim to fame was performing in the original Broadway production of Hair, in which she refused to disrobe at the end of Act I when the cast performed nude. This was actually controversial at the time, though being naked was contractually optional.
She has appeared in a number of Woody Allen films, starting with Play It Again (1972) through Manhattan (1979), with a cameo in Radio Days (1987) and another starring part in Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993), all of which I have seen.
Interesting, and I could have noted this last month on Woody Allen’s 80th birthday, I now wait for the reviews and decide whether to see a Woody film. In the days when Diane was his costar, I saw everything he made. That’s probably more a reflection of his filmmaking than her star power, but there it is.
I’ve also Diane Keaton in The Godfather (1972 – she’s in all three films), Reds (1981 – nominated for a Best Actress Oscar), Crimes of the Heart (1986), Baby Boom (1987), Father of the Bride I and II (1991, 1995), The First Wives Club (1996 – which I liked a lot), Something’s Gotta Give (2003 – nominated for a Best Actress Oscar), and The Family Stone (2005).
I haven’t been drawn to see her more recent films, and I see her only in L’Oreal commercials. But I do want to watch the movie Marvin’s Room (1996), for which she received her fourth Academy Award nomination.
“Keaton wrote her first memoir, entitled Then Again, for Random House in November 2011. Much of the autobiography relies on her mother Dorothy’s private journals, in which she writes at one point: ‘Diane…is a mystery…At times, she’s so basic, at others so wise it frightens me.'”
