‘A Complete Original, and Completely Without Guile’

Bette Midler paid tribute to her friend and The First Wives Club co-star Diane Keaton. The actress died on Saturday at the age of 79.

“The brilliant, beautiful, extraordinary Diane Keaton has died. I cannot tell you how unbearably sad this makes me,” Midler wrote in an Instagram post, which included a black-and-white photo of Keaton. “She was hilarious, a complete original, and completely without guile, or any of the competitiveness one would have expected from such a star.”

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She added: “What you saw was who she was…oh, la, lala!”

Midler and Keaton starred along with Goldie Hawn in 1996’s The First Wives Club, with the stars portraying divorcées who wonderfully, wickedly take revenge on their terrible former spouses. Peter Travers called Keaton and her costars “a comedy dream team” in Rolling Stone’s review of the film.

When the three actresses were awarded the Women in Film Crystal Award in June 1997 for their performances in the film, Midler referred to Keaton as a “dear friend,” as Reuters reported.

“In my heart of hearts I suspect this award is not for our work in The First Wives Club because it is so brilliant,” Midler said while accepting the award, “but rather because everybody was so overjoyed that three actresses of a certain age still have what it takes to deliver a 100-million-dollar-picture just like the testosterone tyrants.”

The co-stars had discussed a sequel to their hit film, but it was not to be. “I used to lobby for First Wives Club 2, but there were political reasons they didn’t want to do that again. And it always broke my heart,” Midler told People in 2022. “I really felt that it was a pretty serious diss, because when women have hits, it’s a fluke. But when men have hits, isn’t it great? At least that’s what they told us on First Wives.”

Hawn had previously told AARP Magazine (via IndieWire) in 2009 that Paramount Pictures planned to pay the actresses the same salary for a sequel that they received for the original film, despite its resounding success.

“Diane [Keaton] called me and said, ‘We’ve got to do this,’” Hawn said at the time. “I got a call from the head of the studio, who said, ‘Let’s try to make it work. But I think we should all do it for the same amount of money.’ Now, if there were three men that came back to do a sequel, they would have paid them three times their salary at least.”

Midler, Keaton, and Hawn were also expected to reunite for a comedy called Family Jewels, as Variety reported in 2020. However, it got stuck in “development hell,” Midler told People in 2024. “It’s in the abyss where all good scripts go to die,” she said.

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