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 Keaton’s most recent films. She did not say where or when Keaton died or cite a cause.
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 menswear, questionable driving skills and lingering hints of an all-too-wholesome Midwestern upbringing.
Keaton received three other Oscar 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 activist journalist Jack Reed (Warren Beatty, who directed).
Another was for “Marvin’s Room” (1993), 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.
The third was for “Something’s Gotta Give” (2003), a comedy about a successful playwright who turns an extremely tearful breakup into a new hit comedy.
Diane Hall was born 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 also crowned Mrs. Los Angeles in a beauty pageant for homemakers.
She grew up in Santa Ana, California, 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.
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 Pacino began dating in 1974, the year “The Godfather, Part II” was released.)
Her final film was “Summer Camp” (2024), a comedy about three old friends at an eventful reunion.
Keaton’s personal life could be fodder at times for the gossip pages as they tracked her romantic relationships, including with Beatty and Allen in addition to 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.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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