Diane Keaton
Keaton's career began on stage, acting in the ensemble of the original Broadway production of the musical Hair (1968) and the romantic interest in Woody Allen's comic play, Play It Again, Sam (1969), the latter of which earned her a nomination for a Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play. She made her screen debut with a small role in Lovers and Other Strangers (1970) before rising to prominence with her first major film role as Kay Adams in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (1972), a role she reprised in the sequels Part II (1974) and Part III (1990).
She frequently collaborated with Allen establishing herself as a comic actress acting in the film adaptation of Play It Again, Sam (1972) followed by Sleeper (1973), Love and Death (1975), and Annie Hall (1977). The latter won her the Academy Award for Best Actress.
Keaton was also Oscar-nominated for her roles as activist Louise Bryant in the historical epic Reds (1981), a leukemia patient in the family drama Marvin's Room (1996), and a dramatist in the romantic comedy Something's Gotta Give (2003). She was known for her roles in dramatic films such as Looking for Mr.
Goodbar (1977), Interiors (1978), Shoot the Moon (1982), and Crimes of the Heart (1986), as well as comedic roles in Manhattan (1979), Baby Boom (1987), Father of the Bride (1991), its 1995 sequel, Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993), The First Wives Club (1996), The Family Stone (2005), Finding Dory (2016), Book Club (2018), and its 2023 sequel. As a filmmaker, she directed three films and a documentary, Heaven (1987).
On television, she portrayed Amelia Earhart in the TNT film Amelia Earhart: The Final Flight (1994), which earned her nominations for the Primetime Emmy Award, Golden Globe Award, and Screen Actors Guild Award, and later a nun in the HBO limited series The Young Pope (2016). Keaton was also known for her distinct style and was often labeled a fashion icon and wrote four books, including her memoir Then Again (2011).
Early life
Diane Hall was born on January 5, 1946, in Los Angeles to Dorothy Deanne (nรฉe Keaton; 1921โ2008) and John Newton Ignatius "Jack" Hall (1922โ1990), She was the eldest of their four children. Dorothy was a homemaker and amateur photographer; Jack was a real estate broker and civil engineer. Through his matriline, Jack was half-Irish.
Keaton was raised a Free Methodist by her mother. Her mother won the "Mrs. Los Angeles" pageant for homemakers; Keaton said that the theatricality of the event inspired her first impulse to become an actress and ultimately her desire to work on stage. She also credited Katharine Hepburn, whom she admired for playing strong and independent women, as one of her inspirations.
Keaton was a 1963 graduate of Santa Ana High School in Santa Ana, California. During her time there, she participated in singing and acting clubs at school, and starred as Blanche DuBois in a school production of A Streetcar Named Desire. After graduation, she attended Santa Ana College and later Orange Coast College as an acting student, but dropped out after a year to pursue an entertainment career in Manhattan.
After joining the Actors' Equity Association, she changed her surname to Keaton, which was her mother's maiden name, as there was already an actress registered under the name of Diane Hall. For a brief time she also moonlighted at nightclubs with a singing act. She revisited her nightclub act in Annie Hall (1977), And So It Goes (2014), and a cameo in Radio Days (1987).
Keaton began studying acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse in Midtown Manhattan, New York. She initially studied acting under the Meisner technique, an ensemble acting technique first evolved in the 1930s by Sanford Meisner, a New York stage actor, acting coach and director who had been a member of The Group Theater (1931โ1940).
She said that her acting technique was "only as good as the person you're acting with... As opposed to going it on my own and forging my path to create a wonderful performance without the help of anyone. I always need the help of everyone!" According to fellow actor Jack Nicholson, "She approaches a script sort of like a play in that she has the entire script memorized before you start doing the movie, which I don't know any other actors doing that."
Career
1968โ1979: The Godfather films and stardom with Annie Hall
In 1968, Keaton became an understudy for the part of Sheila in the original Broadway production of Hair. She gained some notoriety for her refusal to disrobe at the end of Act I when the cast performs nude, even though nudity in the production was optional for actors (those who performed nude received a $50 bonus).
After acting in Hair for nine months, she auditioned for a part in Woody Allen's production of Play It Again, Sam. After nearly being passed over for being too tall (at 5 ft 8 in (173 cm) she was 2 inches (5 cm) taller than Allen) she won the part. She went on to receive a Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actress in a Play for her performance.
In 1970, Keaton appeared in a deodorant commercial for Hour After Hour. That same year, she made her film debut in Lovers and Other Strangers. She followed with guest roles on the television series Love, American Style; Night Gallery; and Mannix.
Keaton's breakthrough role came two years later when she was cast as Kay Adams, the girlfriend and eventual wife of Michael Corleone (played by Al Pacino) in Francis Ford Coppola's 1972 film The Godfather. Coppola noted that he first noticed Keaton in Lovers and Other Strangers, and cast her because of her reputation for eccentricity that he wanted her to bring to the role (Keaton claimed that at the time she was commonly referred to as "the kooky actress" of the film industry).
Her performance in the film was loosely based on her real-life experience of making the film, both of which she described as being "the woman in a world of men." The Godfather was an unparalleled critical and financial success, becoming the highest-grossing film of the year and winning the 1972 Academy Award for Best Picture.
She reprised her role as Kay Adams in The Godfather Part II (1974). She was initially reluctant, saying, "At first, I was skeptical about playing Kay again in the Godfather sequel. But when I read the script, the character seemed much more substantial than in the first film." In Part II, her character changed dramatically, becoming more embittered about her husband's criminal empire.
Even though Keaton received widespread exposure from the films, some critics felt that her character's importance was minimal. Time wrote that she was "invisible in The Godfather and pallid in The Godfather Part II, but according to Empire magazine, Keaton "proves the quiet lynchpin which is no mean feat in [the] necessarily male dominated films."
Keaton's other notable films of the 1970s included many collaborations with Woody Allen. She played many eccentric characters in several of his comic and dramatic films, including Sleeper; Love and Death; Interiors; Manhattan; Manhattan Murder Mystery and the film version of Play It Again, Sam, directed by Herbert Ross.
Allen credited Keaton as his muse during his early film career. In 1976, Keaton starred Off-Broadway in the world premier of the Israel Horovitz play Primary English Class at Circle in the Square Theatre. The New York Times review noted, "Keaton gives a delightful portrait of a woman sinking slowly out of control."
In 1977, Keaton won the Academy Award for Best Actress for Allen's romantic comedy-drama Annie Hall, one of her most famous roles. Annie Hall, written by Allen and Marshall Brickman and directed by Allen, was believed by many to be an autobiographical exploration of his relationship with Keaton. Allen based the character of Annie Hall loosely on Keaton ("Annie" was a nickname of hers, and "Hall" was her original surname).
Many of Keaton's mannerisms and self-deprecating sense of humor were added into the role by Allen. (Director Nancy Meyers has claimed: "Diane's the most self-deprecating person alive.") Keaton also said that Allen wrote the character as an "idealized version" of herself. The two starred as a frequently on-again, off-again couple living in New York City.
Her acting was later summed up by CNN as "awkward, self-deprecating, speaking in endearing little whirlwinds of semi-logic", and by Allen as a "nervous breakdown in slow motion." Annie Hall emerged as a major critical and commercial success and won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Of Keaton's performance, feminist film critic Molly Haskell wrote, "Keaton took me by surprise in Annie Hall.
Here she blossomed into something more than just another kooky dameโshe put the finishing touches on a type, the anti-goddess, the golden shiksa from the provinces who looks cool and together, who looks as if she must have a date on Saturday night, but has only to open her mouth or gulp or dart spastically sideways to reveal herself as the insecure bungler she is, as complete a social disaster in her own way as Allen's horny West Side intellectual is in his." In 2006, Premiere magazine ranked Keaton in Annie Hall 60th on its list of the "100 Greatest Performances of All Time", and noted:
It's hard to play ditzy... The genius of Annie is that despite her loopy backhand, awful driving, and nervous tics, she's also a complicated, intelligent woman. Keaton brilliantly displays this dichotomy of her character, especially when she yammers away on a first date with Alvy (Woody Allen), while the subtitle reads, 'He probably thinks I'm a yoyo.' Yo-yo? Hardly.
Keaton's eccentric wardrobe in Annie Hall, which consisted mainly of vintage men's clothing, including neckties, vests, baggy pants, and fedora hats, made her an unlikely fashion icon of the late 1970s. A small amount of the clothing seen in the film came from Keaton herself, who was already known for her tomboyish clothing style years before Annie Hall, and Ruth Morley designed the film's costumes.
Soon after the film's release, men's clothing and pantsuits became popular attire for women. She was known to favor men's vintage clothing, and usually appeared in public wearing gloves and conservative attire. (A 2005 profile in the San Francisco Chronicle described her as "easy to find. Look for the only woman in sight dressed in a turtleneck. On a 90-degree afternoon in Pasadena.")
Her photo by Douglas Kirkland appeared on the cover of the September 26, 1977, issue of Time magazine, with the story dubbing her "the funniest woman now working in films." Later that year she departed from her usual lighthearted comic roles when she won the highly coveted lead role in the drama Looking for Mr.
Goodbar, based on the novel by Judith Rossner. In the film, written and directed by Richard Brooks, she played a Catholic schoolteacher for deaf children who lives a double life, spending nights frequenting singles bars and engaging in promiscuous sex. Keaton became interested in the role after seeing it as a "psychological case history." The same issue of Time commended her role choice and criticized the restricted roles available for female actors in American films:
A male actor can fly a plane, fight a war, shoot a badman, pull off a sting, impersonate a big cheese in business or politics. Men are presumed to be interesting. A female can play a wife, play a whore, get pregnant, lose her baby, and, um, let's see ... Women are presumed to be dull. ... Now a determined trend spotter can point to a handful of new films whose makers think that women can bear the dramatic weight of a production alone, or virtually so.
Then there is Diane Keaton in Looking for Mr. Goodbar. As Theresa Dunn, Keaton dominates this raunchy, risky, violent dramatization of Judith Rossner's 1975 novel about a schoolteacher who cruises singles bars.
In addition to acting, Keaton said she "had a lifelong ambition to be a singer." She had a brief, unrealized career as a recording artist in the 1970s. Her first record was an original cast recording of Hair, in 1971. In 1977 she began recording tracks for a solo album, but the finished record never materialized.
Keaton met with more success in the medium of still photography. Like her character in Annie Hall, Keaton had long relished photography as a favorite hobby, an interest she picked up as a teenager from her mother. While traveling in the late 1970s, she began exploring her avocation more seriously. "Rolling Stone had asked me to take photographs for them, and I thought, 'Wait a minute, what I'm really interested in is these lobbies, and these strange ballrooms in these old hotels.' So I began shooting them", she recalled in 2003. "These places were deserted, and I could just sneak in anytime and nobody cared.
It was so easy and I could do it myself. It was an adventure for me." Reservations, her collection of photos of hotel interiors, was published in book form in 1980.
1980โ1989: Established actress and continued acclaim
With Manhattan (1979), Keaton and Allen ended their long working relationship; it was their last major collaboration until 1993. Then, in 1978, she became romantically involved with Warren Beatty and he cast her opposite him in the epic historical drama Reds. In the film, she played Louise Bryant, a journalist and feminist, who flees her husband to work with radical journalist John Reed (Beatty) and later enters Russia to find him as he chronicles the Russian Civil War.
Beatty began developing Reds in the 1960s, with historical research and interviews underway by the early 1970s. After years of development, filming began in 1979.
In a 2006 Vanity Fair article, Keaton talked about her role saying that she was "the everyman of that piece, as someone who wanted to be extraordinary but was probably more ordinary... I knew what it felt like to be extremely insecure." Assistant director Simon Relph later said that Louise Bryant was one of Keaton's most difficult roles, and that "[she] almost got broken." Reds opened to widespread critical acclaim, and Keaton's performance was highly praised in particular. The New York Times wrote that Keaton was "nothing less than splendid as Louise Bryantโbeautiful, selfish, funny and driven.
It's the best work she has done to date." Roger Ebert called Keaton "a particular surprise. I had somehow gotten into the habit of expecting her to be a touchy New Yorker, sweet, scared, and intellectual. Here, she is just what she needs to be: plucky, healthy, exasperated, loyal, and funny." Keaton received her second Academy Award for Best Actress nomination for her performance.
In 1982, Keaton starred in the domestic drama Shoot the Moon opposite Albert Finney. The film is about George (Finney) and Faith Dunlap (Keaton), whose deteriorating marriage, separation, and love affairs devastate their four children. Shoot the Moon received mostly positive reviews from critics and Keaton's performance was again praised.
In The New Yorker, Pauline Kael wrote the film was "perhaps the most revealing American movie of the era", and that Keaton "may be a star without vanity: she's so completely challenged by the role of Faith that all she cares about is getting the character right. Very few young American movie actresses have the strength and the instinct for the toughest dramatic rolesโintelligent, sophisticated heroines.
Jane Fonda did, around the time that she appeared in Klute and They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, but that was more than ten years ago. There hasn't been anybody else until now. Diane Keaton acts on a different plane from that of her previous film roles; she brings the character a full measure of dread and awareness and does it in a special, intuitive way that's right for screen acting." David Denby of New York magazine called Keaton "perfectly relaxed and self-assured", adding, "Keaton has always found it easy enough to bring out the anger that lies beneath the soft hesitancy of her surface manner, but she's never dug down and found this much pain before.
Keaton's performance garnered her a second Golden Globe nomination in a row for Best Actress in a Motion Picture โ Drama, following Reds.
1984 brought The Little Drummer Girl, Keaton's first excursion into the thriller and action genre. The Little Drummer Girl was both a financial and critical failure, with critics claiming that Keaton was miscast for the genre, such as one review from The New Republic claiming that "the title role, the pivotal role, is played by Diane Keaton, and around her the picture collapses in tatters.
She is so feeble, so inappropriate." But the same year, she received positive reviews for her performance in Mrs. Soffel, a film based on the true story of a repressed prison warden's wife who falls in love with a convicted murderer and arranges for his escape. Two years later, she starred with Jessica Lange and Sissy Spacek in Crimes of the Heart, adapted from Beth Henley's Pulitzer Prizeโwinning play into a moderately successful screen comedy.
Keaton's performance was well received by critics, and Rita Kempley of The Washington Post wrote, "As the frumpy Lenny, Keaton eases smoothly from New York neurotic to southern eccentric, a reluctant wallflower stymied by, of all things, her shriveled ovary."
In 1987, Keaton starred in Baby Boom, her first of four collaborations with writer-producer Nancy Meyers. She played a Manhattan career woman who is suddenly forced to care for a toddler. A modest box-office success, Keaton's performance was singled out by Kael, who described it as "a glorious comedy performance that rides over many of the inanities in this picture.
Keaton is smashing: the Tiger Lady's having all this drive is played for farce and Keaton keeps you alert to every shade of pride and panic the character feels. She's an ultra-feminine executive, a wide-eyed charmer, with a breathless ditziness that may remind you of Jean Arthur in The More The Merrier." That same year, Keaton made a cameo in Allen's film Radio Days as a nightclub singer. 1988's The Good Mother was a financial disappointment (according to Keaton, the film was "a Big Failure.
Like, BIG failure"), and some critics panned her performance; according to The Washington Post, "her acting degenerates into hypeโas if she's trying to sell an idea she can't fully believe in."
In 1987, Keaton directed and edited her first feature film, Heaven, a documentary about the possibility of an afterlife. It met with mixed critical reaction, with The New York Times likening it to "a conceit imposed on its subjects." Over the next four years, Keaton directed music videos for artists such as Belinda Carlisle, including the video for Carlisle's chart-topping hit "Heaven Is a Place on Earth", two television films starring Patricia Arquette, and episodes of the series China Beach and Twin Peaks.
1990โ1999: Mature roles and reunion with Woody Allen
By the 1990s, Keaton had established herself as one of the most popular and versatile actresses in Hollywood. She shifted to more mature roles, frequently playing matriarchs of middle-class families. Of her role choices and avoidance of becoming typecast, she said: "Most often a particular role does you some good and Bang!
You have loads of offers, all of them for similar roles ... I have tried to break away from the usual roles and have tried my hand at several things."
Keaton began the decade with The Lemon Sisters, a poorly-received comedy-drama that she starred in and produced, which was shelved for a year after its completion. In 1991 she starred with Steve Martin in the family comedy Father of the Bride. She was almost not cast in the film, as The Good Mother's commercial failure had strained her relationship with Walt Disney Pictures, the studio of both films. Father of the Bride was Keaton's first major hit after four years of commercial disappointments.
She reprised her role four years later in the sequel, as a woman who becomes pregnant in middle age at the same time as her daughter. A San Francisco Examiner review of the film was one of many in which Keaton was once again compared to Katharine Hepburn: "No longer relying on that stuttering uncertainty that seeped into all her characterizations of the 1970s, she has somehow become Katharine Hepburn with a deep maternal instinct, that is, she is a fine and intelligent actress who doesn't need to be tough and edgy in order to prove her feminism."
๐ Source: Wikipedia
