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 ...