Diane Keaton, who has died aged 79, was never easy to define. She could be sharp or shy, serious or absurd, sometimes all at once, and it gave her presence a kind of restless grace. News of her death feels unreal, perhaps because she seemed to exist on her own wavelength, never quite belonging to the Hollywood around her. She didn’t move or speak like anyone else. The quick laugh, the awkward pauses, the way she always seemed faintly surprised to be on screen all made her unmistakable. She had magnetism without ever appearing to seek it.
In The Godfather she was the observer, watching power tighten around her; in Annie Hall she turned that distance into freedom. They were arguably her two best-known roles, and together they capture the range of what she could do – from the moral unease of the outsider to the openness of a woman entirely her own creation. As Kay Corleone, she was no typical mob wife. She stood slightly apart from the film’s dark glamour, a moral centre who kept reminding the audience of the ordinary world outside the family’s reach. Her performance gave the story its emotional weight; she made the cost of Michael Corleone’s choices visible. Even in that shadowy world, she softened the brutality. Pacino’s Michael felt more human simply because he chose her.
The clothes in Annie Hall were her own, the voice and timing hers too. And her style. Oh, the style! It was loose but precise, slightly borrowed from men yet never anything but her. The waistcoats, the ties, the oversized trousers shouldn’t have worked together but somehow did. It wasn’t fashion as disguise; it was a way of being. You felt she dressed to please herself, and that calm confidence was what made it unforgettable. I’ve tried to emulate it, of course, but never quite managed to, which only proves how instinctive it was. Impossible to fake, because it wasn’t just what she wore but the way she wore it. She wasn’t the first unconventional leading woman, but there was something about her that felt different, sharper, completely her own. She made hesitation feel expressive and intelligence feel alluring without effort or pretence.
For many women, that mattered. Keaton showed that it was possible to be different; to dress for yourself, to speak in your own rhythm, to resist the idea that femininity must always please. Her characters hesitated, got things wrong, recovered and carried on. It felt recognisably human and refreshingly free of performance.
Off screen, she seemed to live much the same way. She never married and adopted her children later in life. From the outside, it looked as though she’d long stopped caring about expectation. She also made it feel acceptable not to follow the conventional romantic path, to build a life that didn’t depend on being someone’s other half. Resolutely choosing to be the girlfriend rather than the wife, I’ve always taken quiet comfort in that. She seemed to speak to women who valued their independence – clever, funny, sceptical of glamour but never cynical about it.
Her loyalty to Woody Allen, long after others distanced themselves, puzzled many. She never justified it, which seemed entirely in character. I’ve always seen it as part of her consistency. That steady instinct to live by her own compass, whether or not people approved. She didn’t explain or apologise, and there was a certain integrity in that. It wasn’t defiance so much as trust in her own judgement, a belief that you didn’t need to prove yourself to be right.
In interviews she laughed easily, often at herself, and seemed amused by the attention that surrounded her. The hats and tailoring weren’t a costume but simply what she liked to wear, and she could look awkward and composed at once, which I still find oddly reassuring. People called her quirky, but what they really meant, I think, was that she seemed uninterested in polish. She moved slightly apart from Hollywood’s surface, amused by it yet never caught up in it, and that distance gave her work its wit and clarity.
Even later, when she became the romantic lead of middle age, she gave those parts a wit and self-awareness that lifted them beyond cliché. She didn’t reinvent herself; she simply stayed recognisably Keaton, with that mix of curiosity, anxiety and calm that made her performances feel alive. She grew older in public but never seemed old, and she continued to carry herself with imagination and lightness, as though she were still discovering how to play the part.
There was a steadiness about her that I always found comforting: generous, curious, unimpressed by power. She belonged to a generation of actors who made complexity look effortless, who let intelligence and awkwardness coexist on screen without apology. Her death feels like the quiet closing of that chapter, the end of a certain kind of grace. Still, I keep thinking of her line: “You gotta love life to have one.”
[Further reading: Cold-water swimming with Canary Wharf bankers]
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