Diane Keaton 1946-2025 - ‘A legend, an icon and a truly kind human being’

PHOTOGRAPH: JEROD HARRIS/GETTY IMAGES

13 Oct 2025 - The Guardian

Peter Bradshaw

The millpond calm of her face, its beauty, its gentleness, its openness and unworldliness became even more heart stopping when she laughed or cried – and generations of filmgoers felt their own crush on Diane Keaton escalate into something more.

She was not just America’s sweetheart: Keaton was the sophisticated, sweet-natured, unaffectedly sensual woman with whom America was unrequitedly in love. Diane Keaton was out of America’s league.

In the golden age of the American New Wave in the 1970s, she was at the centre of that era’s great comedy and tragedy: as Kay, the innocent wife of Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone in Coppola’s The Godfather (1972), she was the aghast, complicit witness to mob toxicity and murder, paralysed with disillusion and fear as she was shut out of her husband’s dealings in his private sanctum – and then, in the next film, like a modernday Medea, reveals to the icily infuriated Michael the awful truth about her miscarriage.

But in that decade it was as a comic performer of ethereally selfaware genius that she became more known, thanks to her many films playing opposite Woody Allen: in Sleeper; Play It Again, Sam; Love and Death; Manhattan and, most gloriously of all, in Annie Hall (her Oscar-winner). In admiring Keaton’s wonderful performance in that romcom masterpiece we can appreciate that the film is the jewel of the American New Wave – in fact, with its freewheeling city life and its literary gestures and in-jokes, it is closer to the French New Wave.

For a while, Keaton was almost Allen’s comedy partner, the Elaine May to his Mike Nichols or maybe the Gracie Allen to his George Burns, but none of these comparisons quite convey the romantic potency of Keaton/Hall’s screen presence: the elegant, bohemian single woman whose heedless eccentricity, sweetness and vulnerability go far past “kooky” or “ditsy” and certainly beyond the “manic pixie dream girl” persona that would later become fashionable. The point is that Allen’s Alvy Singer is deeply in love with Annie, and can never be with her. The chaotic scenes with the live lobsters, the first they shot together on the film, are sublimely romantic and funny. Yet Keaton could play the straight “feed” to Allen well enough, executing with faultless seriousness the setup in Love and Death as the entrancingly lovely Sonja who is not in love with Allen’s infatuated Boris.

“Sex without love is an empty experience,” she says, to which Boris helplessly replies: “Yes, but as empty experiences go, it’s one of the best.” That immortal gag wouldn’t be the same without the genuine delicacy and wisdom with which Keaton plays it.

Keaton’s performance in the once shocking film Looking for Mr Goodbar from 1977 is one that deserves to be better known: a minor work, maybe, but it was bold and courageous casting against type for Keaton to play the schoolteacher (a very Keatonian profession) who has a need to explore casual sexuality in the same frank if off-the-record way that men are allowed to do: this was a through-the-looking-glass Annie Hall and she is terrific in it.

As the 70s turned into the 80s, and at the very height of her prestige, Keaton was in the epic Reds (1981) with her lover and co-star Warren Beatty, playing the feminist activist Louise Bryant with Beatty as the US socialist journalist John Reed who chronicled the Russian revolution in his book Ten Days That Shook the World. There was, perhaps, a hint of worthiness about the whole film that meant Keaton couldn’t quite shine.

In the 80s and 90s, directors didn’t quite find their way into Keaton’s distrait style, an enigma that retreated more from the lens; she continued to perform in Allen movies such as Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993), and she played comedy in lesser (though perfectly decent) films such as The First Wives Club (1996) about women determined to gain revenge on their ex-husbands.

But it was Nancy Meyers who found a kindred spirit in Keaton, casting her in the addictive, luxury-aspirational romantic comedies that she created with such a sure touch, perhaps most vividly in Baby Boom from 1987 as the corporate career high-flyer who finds herself in a fix when she inherits a child. This was perhaps the last film in which the sharper edge of Keaton’s comic performing style is still visible, playing a terrific scene with the white-coated Sam Shepard, tearfully opening up to him about her lack of sex and unaware that he’s a vet, not a doctor. I always remember the fierce way she looks at herself in the ladies’ room mirror towards the end of the film when it looks as if she can reclaim her job, visibly vibrating with excitement.

The high-water mark of Keaton’s late period was in Meyers’s Something’s Gotta Give in 2003, when she finds herself being courted by two men: Jack Nicholson, the ageing roué notorious for dating younger women, and Keanu Reeves, the impossibly dishy doctor whom Keaton meets because of Nicholson’s heart scare.

For a female star to be adored by these two movie galacticos is a difficult look to pull off and really Keaton was the only candidate: even in middle age she has that innocence and unaffected charm. The thought of Hollywood without Diane Keaton is unbearably sad.

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‘A truly kind human being’: tributes paid to a beloved star

‘Crushing news that she is gone, 

but her smile and her style and antic spirit will live 

on film and in our hearts for ever’

   - Meryl Streep

13 Oct 2025 - The Guardian

Catherine Shoard

Tributes were paid yesterday by some of Hollywood’s biggest names after the death of the actor Diane Keaton at the age of 79.

The death of Keaton, who won an Oscar for her role in Annie Hall and was beloved for her unique fashion sense, came as a shock across Hollywood. She had not been in the public eye for some months, but no illness had been announced.

People magazine, which confirmed Keaton’s death, quoted a source close to the actor as saying that the actor’s health had “declined very suddenly” over recent months, adding that even many of her longtime friends “weren’t fully aware of what was happening”.

Robert De Niro, who starred with Keaton in several films including The Godfather - Part II, told the Hollywood Reporter: “I am very sad to hear of Diane’s passing. I was very fond of her and the news of her leaving us has taken me totally by surprise. I was not expecting her to leave us. She will be missed. May she rest in peace.”

In a statement shared with the Guardian, Meryl Streep, who starred alongside her in Marvin’s Room, called Keaton “our American treasure: indelible singular girl and brilliant artist. Crushing news that she is gone, but her smile and her style and antic spirit will live on film and in our hearts for ever.”

Leonardo DiCaprio, who acted alongside both women in the film, called Keaton “brilliant, funny, and unapologetically herself” on Instagram. “A legend, an icon, and a truly kind human being.”

An enduring and singular icon of cinema since her Oscar-winning turn in 1977’s Annie Hall – which her director, writer, co-star and former boyfriend Woody Allen based on her life – she starred in some of the most notable films of the past half century.

Her self-deprecation, gift for comedy and distinctive dress sense – she was rarely seen without a hat, turtleneck or man’s tie and wide trousers – made her both highly distinctive and impossible to emulate.

Her first big film role was opposite Al Pacino in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather – she reprised the role of Michael Corleone’s wife Kay in the two sequels. There were Oscar nominations for her performances in Reds (1981), Marvin’s Room (1996) and Something’s Gotta Give (2003).

Meanwhile, dramas such as Looking for Mr Goodbar, Shoot the Moon and The Good Mother established her as an actor unafraid of playing unlikeable women.

Paying tribute yesterday, Coppola said: “Everything about Diane Keaton was creativity personified.”

Keaton and Allen first collaborated on the stage version of Play It Again, Sam, for which she was Tony nominated in 1971, before going on to work together on eight films including Sleeper (1973), Love and Death (1975) and Manhattan (1979).

She remained a staunch supporter of Allen after the accusation by Mia Farrow that he had abused their adopted daughter, Dylan. Allen has repeatedly denied the allegation, which was investigated, resulting in no criminal charges.

Keaton went on to make Baby Boom, Father of the Bride, The First Wives Club and Book Club. The sequel to that film, Book Club: The Next Chapter, in 2023, looks set to be one of her last projects. Speaking to the Guardian, she addressed why she chose to remain so prolific, making seven films since the start of the pandemic. “It gives me an opportunity to get to know more people in a different realm,” she said. “I love it. It’s all interesting. It’s never dull, ever, life.”

In 1996, Keaton adopted a daughter, Dexter (named after Cary Grant’s character in The Philadelphia Story) and, four years later, a son, Duke. “Motherhood has completely changed me,” she said. “It’s just about like the most completely humbling experience.” Despite well-publicised relationships with some of her costars including Pacino and Warren Beatty, she remained unmarried.

Keaton cared for her mother from her diagnosis with Alzheimer’s in 1993 until her death in 2008, and devoted much of her autobiographies to recounting her mother’s life and publishing her diaries.

“She was everything to me,” she said of her mother. “She was wonderful. She was my example for what you can do with life. She was the heart of everything that was best.”

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PHOTOGRAPH: BETTMANN

Keaton in Annie Hall with Woody Allen. 

He told the costume department: ‘Leave her. 

She’s a genius. Let her wear what she wants’

Diane didn’t just wear a style – she created one

13 Oct 2025 - The Guardian

Jess Cartner-Morley

Personal style is the best kind of style there is, and no one did personal style better than Diane Keaton. Her signature look was shirts and ties, snappy waistcoats and baggy trousers, an idiosyncratic version of menswear that was somehow both elegant and goofy. It was part Beau Brummell and part Charlie Chaplin. “Borrowed from the boys” does not do it justice; she made it entirely her own.

The charm of her wardrobe was that it was exactly her. She was a world-class beauty who didn’t lead with her looks. A quiet subversive who, in the most cookie-cutter of Hollywood eras, dodged the stamp of the machine and chose to live her life her own way. It was never about menswear as power dressing. With a sunny smile, she broke all the rules of celebrity dressing with the disarming sweetness and quiet intelligence she brought to her screen personas.

“I look back on Annie Hall and can’t talk about that movie without talking about the fashion,” she once said about her most memorable role. “It was everything to me. I loved being able to dress like myself.”

Much of Keaton’s on-screen wardrobe as Annie Hall was, simply, Keaton’s own wardrobe. She layered what she already had with pieces she bought herself from thrift stores. When the costume department tried to steer her in a different direction, Woody Allen intervened, telling them: “Leave her. She’s a genius. Let her wear what she wants.”

Naturally, the Hollywood patriarchy did its best to hand the laurels to a man, Ralph Lauren, who supplied a blazer and a tie for Keaton to wear as Annie Hall. But Lauren wrote, in the foreword to Keaton’s 2024 book Fashion First: “I am often credited with dressing Diane in her Oscar-winning role as Annie Hall. Not so. Annie’s style was Diane’s style.”

Like Cary Grant, Keaton had a way of breathing life into a tailored silhouette. She made heavily structured outfits – jackets, belted trousers, chunky shoes, the omnipresent banded hats and spectacles – feel alive. There are echoes, too, of Fred Astaire’s kinetic elegance in Keaton’s wardrobe. A gifted physical comic, she used the way she wore clothes – the tip of a hat, the hand stuffed in a pocket – to accentuate her gestures.

Her more eccentric choices – tartan shirts on the red carpet, white socks with evening sandals – brought her a fair amount of media flak. A tailcoat with white carnation and black leather gloves at the Oscars in 2004. A pinstripe seersucker suit with platform twotone brogues and a basket in the shape of a sausage dog at a Thom Browne fashion show in Paris in 2023. But she stuck to her guns.

In Fashion First, she writes that wearing men’s clothing gave her privacy. A big belted coat, she says, is her version of a ballgown. Her screwball, brainy elegance helped bring masculine styling into the mainstream of women’s fashion. Although she demurred at the notion that she came up with it – she once said the inspiration for Annie Hall came in part from what “the cool-looking women” in New York’s SoHo were wearing – she was a true original. She didn’t just wear a style, she invented a style.

I saw Keaton once, a few years ago, at a Ralph Lauren party in Los Angeles. Starstruck, I mumbled something about being a fan and asked if I could take a photo of her. “Sure! Let’s take a selfie,” she said, leaning in close and beaming at my phone over my shoulder. In the photo, she is wearing a high-collared white blouse and a bowler hat.

She looked great, because she was great. La-di-da for ever.