Diane Keaton, the iconoclastic and left-of-center Oscar-winning film and fashion icon, has died, according to a family spokesperson who shared the news with People magazine. She was 79 years old. Further details about her death were not made available. She received four Academy Award nominations, winning in 1977 for “Annie Hall,” the film that turned her into a household name and one of the most recognizable figures in American movies. Keaton received an AFI Life Achievement Award in 2017.
Her collaborations with Woody Allen began onscreen with director Herbert Ross’ “Play It Again, Sam” in 1972, the same year she starred as Kay Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Godfather.” Her comedic appeal was cemented in Allen films — the two were also romantically involved — like “Sleeper’ and “Love and Death” before the title character in “Annie Hall” changed the course of her career and the course of movies. Before that, though, she had starred with Allen in the stage version of “Play It Again, Sam” in 1969 and in the musical “Hair,” propelling her from her birth city of Los Angeles to New York. Keaton for most of her life resided in Los Angeles, where she flipped and designed houses. As a single parent — she made being single and evasive of later romantic partnerships part of her identity, too — she adopted her daughter Dexter in 1996 and son Duke five years later.
She never quite fit into any box comfortably, but brought to her roles both a nervous energy and focused intensity. The same year as “Annie Hall,” she also starred in the controversial, cautionary morality tale “Looking for Mr. Goodbar” as a schoolteacher of deaf children who is tormented by the men she dates in New York City; it’s certainly her darkest role and was an early beacon of a propensity for drama as much as comedy.
After her Best Actress win for “Annie Hall,” she also received Oscar nominations for “Reds,” “Marvin’s Room,” and “Something’s Gotta Give,” the Nancy Meyers film largely seen as her big-screen comeback in 2003. That was also the film that launched a late-career stretch of romantic comedies and movies for older audiences in which she largely plays a version of herself: neurotic, quirky, unfiltered, and in impeccable head-to-toe tailoring.
Making guardedness and affable self-deprecation part of her identity, Keaton was known for wearing turtlenecks, gloves, and hats that kept her largely covered up, saving emotional vulnerability for her performances. Ralph Lauren gave much of the credit for the “Annie Hall” costumes to Keaton herself, and wide-legged pants, blazers, vests, ties, and oversized hats — all a playful, Chaplinesque spin on tailored menswear — became signatures in her look: Keaton is recognizable in any of her films because she always appeared to have a hand in her characters’ styling.
The recent “Book Club” films exemplify her late-career attitude. There was a sense in Keaton’s late years that she wanted to have a good time onscreen with collaborators she enjoyed, such as the “Book Club” series co-stars Jane Fonda and Candice Bergen.
A throughline of her film career was working with top filmmakers to deliver complicated performances that pushed her against comfortability, whether in Allen’s darker efforts (like “Interiors,” or aspects of “Manhattan” as a self-defeating intellectual) or with Coppola, Warren Beatty (“Reds,” and another collaborator with whom she was romantically involved), or a box-office favorite like Charles Shyer with the 1987 feminist comedy “Baby Boom.” In 1993, she reteamed with Allen for the last time on the delightfully anxious New York comedy “Manhattan Murder Mystery.”
Around that time she had been at the end of a relationship with her “Godfather” co-star of all three films, Al Pacino. She detailed that relationship movingly in her wonderfully frank and fresh memoirs “Then Again” (2011) and “Let’s Just Say It Wasn’t Pretty” (2014), two books where you really feel her voice ringing through rather than a ghost memoirist taking dictation.
Comedies really became Keaton’s preferred genre in the last 30 years or so, from the delightfully camp “The First Wives Club” in 1996 to films like “And So It Goes,” “The Book Wedding,” and “The Family Stone” more recently. Don’t forget she also played Justin Bieber’s grandmother in the 2021 music video “Ghost” and starred as a sparky nun on HBO’s “The Young Pope.”
She also had credits behind the camera, including as the director of “Hanging Up” and the documentary “Heaven” as well as episodic television, including on Season 2 episodes of “Twin Peaks” in its early run. These directorial projects were less successful; those “Twin Peaks” episodes especially are not in the series’ annals even as she was largely following the series rulebook on a job for hire. But they showed a curiosity and collaborative spirit, which she maintained through to the end. The last movie she starred in was 2024’s “Summer Camp” with Kathy Bates and Alfre Woodard.
Her belovedness was no better exemplified recently than in 2017 when Woody Allen, then already well into being on shaky ground with Hollywood, made a rare public appearance at the AFI Life Achievement Award ceremony to present the honor to his dear friend, ex-partner, and most important collaborator. As far as American movies are concerned, she’s up there as one of the most recognizable, inimitable, and singularly stamped stars of all time; her impact on Hollywood will be impossible to recreate, but it’s not like any of the essential films she starred in is going anywhere any time soon.