A Sense of Doubt blog post #3895 - Diane Keaton RIP - 1946 - 2025
Diane Keaton died of pneumonia:
https://ew.com/diane-keaton-family-shares-her-cause-of-death-11830782
Diane Keaton has always been one of my favorite people in the universe. I wish I had actually known her. I think we would have been good friends.
I admired her very much.
See you on the other side, Ms. Keaton.
Diane Keaton, a Star of ‘Annie Hall’ and ‘First Wives Club,’ Dies at 79
She brought an unconventional personality to scores of roles on television and in movies ranging from zany comedies like “Sleeper” to piercing dramas like “The
Godfather.”
Diane Keaton, the vibrant, sometimes unconventional, always charmingly self-deprecating actress who won an Oscar for Woody Allen’s comedy “Annie Hall” and appeared in some 100 movie and television roles, an almost equal balance of them in comedies like “Sleeper” and “The First Wives Club” and dramas like “The Godfather” and “Marvin’s Room,” has died. She was 79.
Her death was confirmed by Dori Rath, who produced a number of Ms. Keaton’s most recent films. She did not say where or when Ms. Keaton died or cite a cause.
Ms. Keaton was 31 and a veteran of eight films, most of them comedies, when she starred as the title character in “Annie Hall” (1977), a single woman in New York City with ambitions, insecurities and definite style. Annie is known for cheerful psychiatric breakthroughs, fashions that look like men’s wear, questionable driving skills and lingering hints of an all-too-wholesome Midwestern upbringing.
“Annie Hall,” which won three other Oscars including best picture, brought Ms. Keaton a shower of additional honors, including acting awards from the National Board of Review, the National Society of Film Critics, the New York Film Critics Circle and the British Academy of Film and Television Artists.
The Hollywood Reporter’s review of the movie called Ms. Keaton “the consummate actress of our generation” and observed that she “adds the charm and warmth and spontaneity” that make “Annie Hall” plausible.
Ms. Keaton did not win another Oscar, but she received three other nominations. One was for the sweeping Oscar-winning drama “Reds” (1981), in which she played Louise Bryant, an intense 1910s writer hanging out with Greenwich Village socialists and Bolshevik revolutionaries, notably the activist journalist Jack Reed (played by Warren Beatty, who also directed).
Another was for “Marvin’s Room” (1996), in which she played the selfless daughter who is taking care of her slowly dying father and her scatterbrained aunt when she receives a diagnosis of leukemia and needs a bone-marrow transplant. Her co-stars included Meryl Streep, Leonardo DiCaprio and Hume Cronyn.
Her final nomination was for “Something’s Gotta Give” (2003), a comedy, written and directed by Nancy Meyers, about a successful playwright who turns an extremely tearful breakup into a new hit comedy. She attracts the attentions of a handsome, much younger doctor (Keanu Reeves) and inspires a sexist man in his 60s (Jack Nicholson) to fall in love with a woman his own age.
Ms. Keaton was also a director. Her first film was “Heaven” (1987), a documentary on beliefs about the afterlife. In her last, she directed herself, Meg Ryan and Lisa Kudrow in the comic drama “Hanging Up” (2000), based on a novel by Delia Ephron.
“Unstrung Heroes” (1995), her first foray into fictional filmmaking, starred Andie MacDowell, John Turturro and Michael Richards. The story of a teenage boy’s idiosyncratic uncles was selected for Un Certain Regard, the prestigious sidebar at the Cannes Film Festival. Peter Travers, reviewing it for Rolling Stone, said it “works like a charm.” Rita Kempley of The Washington Post called it “sweet madness” and a “sensitive coming-of-age story.”
A film career was always Ms. Keaton’s goal. She explained her aversion to theater as a lifelong pursuit on “CBS Sunday Morning” in 2010. “Night after night? Doing a play?” she said, putting an imaginary gun to her head. “That’s my idea of hell.”
Diane Hall was born on Jan.
5, 1946, in Los Angeles. She was the eldest of four children of John Newton
Ignatius Hall, known as Jack, a civil engineer, and Dorothy Deanne (Keaton)
Hall, an amateur photographer who was crowned Mrs. Los Angeles in a beauty
pageant for homemakers.
Diane’s father gave her the
nickname Perkins and often addressed her as “Di-annie,” Ms. Keaton wrote in her
memoir.
She grew up in Santa Ana,
Calif., near Los Angeles, and briefly attended community colleges, first Santa
Ana and then Orange Coast. At 19, she dropped out and moved to New York to study
acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse.
She made her Broadway debut
in the hit musical “Hair,” first as a member of the ensemble and then as
Sheila, the female lead. (She turned down the $50 bonus offered to actors who
were willing to appear nude in one scene.)
Her Broadway career
continued, and her partnership with Mr. Allen began, with “Play It Again, Sam” (1969), in which she played a
romantically desirable married woman opposite Mr. Allen as a nebbishy divorced
friend. That performance earned her a Tony Award nomination for best featured
actress in a play.
Her film debut came the next year, when she played an unhappy young wife at a suburban wedding in “Lovers and Other Strangers” (1970). Then, after a handful of television appearances, she played Kay Adams, the clearly non-Sicilian girlfriend turned trusting wife of Michael Corleone (played by Al Pacino), in Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Godfather” (1972). (She and Mr. Pacino began dating in 1974, the year “The Godfather Part II” was released.)
For all the acclaim that “The Godfather” drew, Ms. Keaton, ever self-effacing, hardly raved about her own performance in it. “Right from the beginning I thought I wasn’t right for the part,” she told The Times after the movie was released. “I haven’t seen the film. I just decided I would save myself the pain. I had to see a few scenes because I had to loop — dub in some dialogue — and I couldn’t stand looking at myself. I thought I looked so terrible, just like a stick in those ’40s clothes!
Three years later, the same
year “Annie Hall” was released, she starred in the wrenching drama “Looking for
Mr. Goodbar” as a young teacher who prowls singles bars almost every night.
Molly Haskell’s review in New York magazine called Ms. Keaton’s “the
performance of a lifetime” and the movie itself “harrowing, powerful,
appalling.” Some observed that although she won the Oscar for “Annie Hall,”
many voters had been influenced by “Mr. Goodbar,” which they considered
brilliant but too hard to take.
She appeared regularly in Mr.
Allen’s films, starting with the movie version of “Play It Again, Sam” (1972),
directed by Herbert Ross; “Sleeper” (1973), a comedy set in a dystopian future;
and “Love and Death” (1975), set in czarist Russia. She also starred in two of
Mr. Allen’s more serious films, “Interiors” (1978) and the
multiple-award-winning “Manhattan” (1979).
Although she dismissed her
early singing ambitions as foolish, she sang two numbers in “Annie Hall” and
made a cameo appearance as a 1940s nightclub singer in Mr. Allen’s “Radio Days”
(1987). Their last film together was “Manhattan Murder Mystery” (1993).
In
addition to “Reds,” “Marvin’s Room” and the sequels to “The Godfather” (1974
and 1990), she starred in several other dramas, some with satirical undertones.
They included “Shoot the Moon” (1982), in which she and Albert Finney played an
unhappy California couple going through a divorce; “Crimes of the Heart”
(1986), Bruce Beresford’s adaptation of Beth Henley’s Southern Gothic, playing
the spinster sister of Jessica Lange and Sissy Spacek; and the mini-series “The
Young Pope” (2016), as a nun who is personal secretary and confidante to the
pope, played by Jude Law.
But her talent for
sophisticated farce didn’t go to waste. Before “Something’s Gotta Give,” she
appeared in other comedies directed or written by Ms. Meyers: “Baby Boom”
(1987), opposite Sam Shepard, as a big-city executive who inherits a baby and
moves to Vermont; and “Father of the Bride” (1991) and its 1995 sequel, opposite
Steve Martin.
From left, Ms. Keaton, Goldie Hawn and Bette Midler in “The First Wives Club” (1996), a major box-office hit.Paramount/Everett Collection
Speaking at a comedy festival
in Aspen, Colo., in 2004, Ms. Meyers compared Ms. Keaton’s comedic skills to
those of two big stars of an earlier generation, Katharine Hepburn and Jean
Arthur. And Mr. Allen himself went even further. “My opinion is that with the
exception of Judy Holliday, she’s the finest screen comedienne we’ve ever
seen,” he told The Times.
Ms. Keaton’s other comedy
films included “Harry and Walter Go to New York” (1975), set in the 1890s, with
James Caan and Elliott Gould; “The Family Stone” (2005), with an ensemble cast
including Dermot Mulroney, Sarah Jessica Parker and Craig T. Nelson; “5 Flights
Up” (2014), opposite Morgan Freeman; and “Poms” (2019), about retirement-age
cheerleaders.
“The First Wives Club” (1996), in which she starred with Goldie Hawn and Bette Midler, was a comedy of revenge — or justice, depending on your point of view. Ms. Keaton’s character, for instance, learns that the therapist she has come to trust is actually having an affair with her estranged husband. It was a major box-office hit.
Her final film was “Summer
Camp” (2024), a comedy about three old friends at an eventful reunion.
Ms. Keaton’s personal life
could at times be fodder for the gossip pages as they tracked her romantic
relationships, including with Mr. Beatty and Mr. Allen in addition to Mr.
Pacino. She never married and adopted two children, a son, Duke Keaton, and a daughter,
Dexter Keaton. Complete information on her survivors was not immediately
available.
“Getting older hasn’t made me
wiser,” she told People magazine, with a typically self-critical eye, in 2019,
insisting cheerfully, “I don’t know anything, and I haven’t learned.”
Over the years, though, she
wrote a dozen or so books — volumes on fashion, art and architecture as well as
memoirs. Writing in The New York Times Book Review in 2014, Sheila Weller
called Ms. Keaton’s memoir “Then Again” “provocatively honest” and Ms. Keaton
“bitingly wry, ironic and tough about herself.”
“Then Again” offered Ms.
Keaton an opportunity to observe, “I learned I couldn’t shed light on love
other than to feel its comings and goings and be grateful.”
It also gave her a chance to
challenge an adage or two. “If beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” she
wrote, “does that mean mirrors are a waste of time?”
https://www.vogue.com/article/diane-keaton-obituary
https://www.marca.com/en/lifestyle/movies/2025/10/12/68ebab0f22601df80b8b45d6.html
https://ew.com/snl-star-pays-tribute-to-mentor-diane-keaton-after-actress-death-you-changed-my-life-11828697
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- Days ago: MOM = 3760 days ago & DAD = 414 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I post Hey Mom blog entries on special occasions. I post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day, and now I have a second count for Days since my Dad died on August 28, 2024. I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of Mom's death, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of her death and sometimes 13:40 EDT for the time of Dad's death. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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