DIANE

This blog seems increasingly to have turned into an obituary page lately. 2025 has been quite a year for seismic losses, especially in film culture. David Lynch was a big one, and Gene Hackman, Robert Redford, and now Diane Keaton have all reminded us cinephiles that an entire era of Hollywood is disappearing fast before our eyes. Yet, as Norma Desmond says in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, “stars never fade.”

My first real appreciation of Diane Keaton began the first time I watched Play It Again, Sam late one Friday night on television, when I was about 11 or 12, as part of a Woody Allen season on BBC Two. She played Linda Christie, best friend to Allan Felix (Woody Allen), whose love life is in utter turmoil after his wife leaves him because of his neurotic, movie-obsessed lifestyle as a film critic.

Her sheer charm and playfulness in Play It Again, Sam are irresistible and provide the perfect counterpoint to Allen’s hyperactively insecure bachelor. One scene, in which she helps Allan prepare for a blind date with one of her friends, is utterly hilarious, and she delivers the classic line, “Play Oscar Peterson and leave Bartók out.”

In many ways, it now seems she was a kind of Ginger Rogers to Allen’s comedic Fred Astaire, matching his neurosis in subtle and brilliant ways over the course of the eight movies they made together. She conveyed a full spectrum of humanity in performances that ranged from thoughtful and flighty to hysterical and emotional, but always utterly human.

Later, in 1979, Keaton returned in Allen’s Manhattan as a much spikier and more assertive character, Mary Wilkie, who carries significantly more emotional baggage in contrast to Tracy (Mariel Hemingway), the much younger and far less age-appropriate muse to Allen’s TV writer, Isaac Davis.

Although Keaton and Allen’s characters do not find a happy ending together in Manhattan, they share one of the most romantic moments in all of cinema. Sitting before the Queensboro Bridge late at night while Gershwin’s Someone to Watch Over Me plays on the soundtrack, they enjoy a brief, serene moment of respite from their mutually complicated private lives, all captured in gorgeous, transcendent monochrome.

Keaton may have been most famous for Annie Hall and The Godfather films, but it is in this brief, exquisite moment in Manhattan that she and Allen touch upon a kind of fragile immortality that endures forever.

Rest in Peace, Diane Keaton (January 5, 1946 – October 11, 2025)