{"id":2085741,"date":"2025-10-12T13:02:24","date_gmt":"2025-10-12T13:02:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=2085741"},"modified":"2025-10-12T13:02:24","modified_gmt":"2025-10-12T13:02:24","slug":"diane-keaton-was-strange-surreal-and-complicated-her-lesser-known-work-is-proof","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/diane-keaton-was-strange-surreal-and-complicated-her-lesser-known-work-is-proof\/","title":{"rendered":"Diane Keaton was strange, surreal and complicated \u2013 her lesser-known work is proof"},"content":{"rendered":"

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In 1987, Diane Keaton directed a documentary about dying<\/a>. Heaven is a scrapbook collage of a film, in which Keaton intercuts footage of Hollywood stars, silent movies, dead clowns, and floating heads alongside interviews with individuals of all stripes: she asks them what they believe happens in the afterlife, what lies beyond this mortal coil, and whether they\u2019ll be happy once they get there. She couldn\u2019t believe the film got financed. \u201cIt turns out that the people who like Heaven most are from two groups: women and \u2018experiential\u2019 types,\u201d she told Interview magazine that year. \u201cI asked, \u2018What\u2019s an experiential type?\u2019, and it turns out that they\u2019re your weirdos, oddballs \u2013 your downtown set.\u201d<\/p>\n

Keaton, who has died at the age of 79<\/a>, had a life full of these eccentric little detours. It\u2019d be wrong to call her underrated. The outpouring of love from co-stars, exes and movie fans in the hours since the news broke is proof of how much she mattered \u2013 as an icon of New Hollywood filmmaking, a symbol of off-kilter style and off-kilter living, and a pioneer in how we think about comedy, romance and performance on screen. But there was always a sense that few got the totality of her, that she had unusual interests and a singular point of view on the world that went beyond the androgynous dressing for which she was known, or that anxious, fiddly la-di-da, la-di-da, la la of her voice.<\/p>\n

Keaton produced independent films about school shootings, published coffee table books of her photography, had an interest in taking snapshots of shopfronts and houses, and wrote elegantly and frankly about mental illness in a book about her late brother, who struggled throughout his life.<\/p>\n

In interviews, particularly those that took place in her later years, Keaton breezed past many of these things \u2013 as if they were mere spill-over from a big box of zany personal quirks that no one could possibly be interested in. \u201cI really am fascinated by these [abandoned] places, because they\u2019re abandoned, but they were something very important,\u201d she told The Guardian in 2023. \u201cAnyway, we shouldn\u2019t talk about that, because people are gonna go: \u2018What is she talking about? Get rid of her!\u2019\u201d It was always unclear if this sort of approach to public conversation was defensive by design, or whether she truly believed people wanted the \u201cDiane Keaton<\/a> persona\u201d over the real nitty-gritty of her.<\/p>\n

That persona, of course, was gargantuan. The scatterbrained nervousness. The sing-song neuroses. The menswear. Woody Allen<\/a> helped harness it, directing her to an Oscar in his seminal romcom Annie Hall (1977), but it got massaged over time \u2013 in the squawking comic hopelessness of her businesswoman-turned-single-mum in Baby Boom (1987), the slapstick delusion she brought to the scorned ex comedy The First Wives Club (1996), and the weeping messiness of her work in Nancy Meyers\u2019s late-in-life romcom Something\u2019s Gotta Give (2003).<\/p>\n

I liked her sadness most of all, though. There is the sheer devastation slapped across her face in the final seconds of The Godfather (1972), of course, and the haunted unease of her work in Looking for Mr Goodbar (1977), in which her character trawls Manhattan\u2019s singles bars aching for sex and attention and hurtling towards certain doom. But it\u2019s also there in so many of her comedies. Annie Hall hinges on a particular kind of self-loathing typically masked by comic theatrics and flibbertigibbet filler words. Annie is convinced she\u2019s not smart or interesting or beautiful (Allen based the character on Keaton herself), despite very clearly being absolutely all of these things.<\/p>\n

Later on, in 1993\u2019s Manhattan Murder Mystery, arguably Allen\u2019s most underrated work, he cast Keaton as a middle-aged melancholic, somebody suddenly bored by her life and marriage, pining after what might have been (in the form of a man she could have run off with), and recasting herself as an amateur detective to give her something novel to do. It\u2019s an incredibly funny performance, but laced with prickly anxiety. I think often of a scene in which she and Alan Alda, playing the one who got away, stake out a woman\u2019s apartment in the rain, and talk about a time when they could have gone all the way together. \u201cIt could have been our little secret,\u201d Alda tells her. \u201cYeah. God,\u201d she replies. \u201cIt feels like such a long time ago, doesn\u2019t it?\u201d She trails off, sad and blushing.<\/p>\n

Call it the curse of the romantic comedy heroine that Hollywood\u2019s greatest purveyors of quiet insecurity and restlessness (among them Meg Ryan, Sandra Bullock, and Lisa Kudrow) are so often considered far breezier and less complex actors than they actually are. Keaton is very much the blueprint for this: a woman of such depth and fascination, yet so often reduced to a \u201ctype\u201d. Her later work saw her play variations on the klutzy, chaotic, immaculately tailored neurotic: Book Club, Summer Camp, Arthur\u2019s Whisky, all movies that felt wildly beneath her.<\/p>\n

In death, hopefully, the scope of Keaton\u2019s work and interests will be more widely appreciated. The memoirs. The photographs. The episode of Twin Peaks she directed. The fact that she was, genuinely, always a Hollywood outsider \u2013 an inspiration for many, beloved by many more, but someone who only ever marched to the beat of her own drum. \u201cI had no sense of the world and I did not hang out,\u201d she told Interview back in 1987, about her time in the outr\u00e9 musical Hair in the late Sixties. \u201cI was never a true member of the tribe, although I did like the show.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source au.news.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 1987, Diane Keaton directed a documentary about dying. Heaven is a scrapbook collage of a film, in which Keaton intercuts footage of Hollywood stars, silent movies, dead clowns, and floating heads alongside interviews with individuals of all stripes: she asks them what they believe happens in the afterlife, what lies beyond this mortal coil, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2085742,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25173],"tags":[392226,392216,43395,354222],"class_list":["post-2085741","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artists","tag-annie-hall","tag-diane-keaton","tag-hollywood-stars","tag-woody-allen"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Diane-Keaton-was-strange-surreal-and-complicated-\u2013-her-lesser-known.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2085741","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2085741"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2085741\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2085743,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2085741\/revisions\/2085743"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2085742"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2085741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2085741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2085741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}