Cinema Experts

"I think that people who are famous tend to be underdeveloped in their humanity skills."
After being nominated for a Tony Award for Play It Again, Sam, Keaton made her film debut in 1970s Lovers and Other Strangers. She followed with guest roles on the television series Love, American Style and Night Gallery. Between films, Keaton appeared in a series of deodorant commercials.
Keaton's breakthrough role came when she was cast as Kay Adams, the girlfriend of Michael Corleone (played by Al Pacino) in Francis Ford Coppola's 1972 blockbuster The Godfather. Coppola noted that he first noticed Keaton in Lovers and Other Strangers, and cast her because of her reputation for eccentricity that he wanted her to bring to the role (Keaton claims that at the time she was commonly referred to as "the kooky actress" of the film industry). Her performance in the film was loosely based on her real life experience of making the film, both of which she has described as being "the woman in a world of men". The Godfather was an unparalleled critical and financial success, and won the Best Picture Oscar of 1972.
Two years later she reprised her role in The Godfather, Part II. She was initially reluctant to reprise her role, stating that, "At first, I was skeptical about playing Kay again in the Godfather sequel. But when I read the script, the character seemed much more substantial than in the first movie." In Part II her character had changed dramatically, becoming more embittered about her husband's activities. Even though Keaton received widespread exposure from the films, her character's importance was minimal. Time wrote that she was "invisible in The Godfather and pallid in The Godfather, Part II."
Keaton's other notable films of the 1970s included many collaborations with Woody Allen. Although by the time they made films together their romantic involvement had ended, she played many eccentric characters in several of his comic and dramatic films including Sleeper, Love and Death, Interiors, Manhattan, and the film version of Play It Again, Sam, directed by Herbert Ross. Allen has gone on to credit Keaton as his muse during his early film career.
In 1977, Keaton starred with Allen in the romantic comedy Annie Hall, in which she played one of her most famous roles. Annie Hall was written and directed by Allen, her paramour at the time, and the film was believed to be autobiographical of his relationship with Keaton. Allen based the character of Annie Hall loosely on Keaton ("Annie" is a nickname of hers, and "Hall" is her original surname). Many of Keaton's mannerisms and her self-deprecating sense of humor were added into the role by Allen. (Director Nancy Meyers has claimed "Diane's the most self-deprecating person alive").
Keaton has also said that Allen wrote the character as an "idealized version" of herself. The two starred as a frequently on-again, off-again couple living in New York City. Her acting was later summed up by CNN as "awkward, self-deprecating, speaking in endearing little whirlwinds of semi-logic", and by Allen as a "nervous breakdown in slow motion." The film was both a major financial and critical success, and won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Keaton's performance also won the Academy Award for Best Actress. In 2006, Premiere magazine ranked Keaton in Annie Hall as 60th on their list of the "100 Greatest Performances of All Time":
Keaton's eccentric wardrobe in Annie Hall, which consisted mainly of vintage men's clothing, including neckties, vests, baggy pants, and fedora hats, made her an unlikely fashion icon of the late 1970s. Most of the clothing seen in the film came from Keaton herself, who was already known for her tomboyish clothing style years before Annie Hall, though Ruth Morley and Ralph Lauren reportedly worked on the movie's costume.
Soon after the film's release, men's clothing and pantsuits became popular attire for women. She is known to favor men's vintage clothing, and usually appears in public wearing gloves and conservative attire. (A 2005 profile in the San Francisco Chronicle described her as "easy to find. Look for the only woman in sight dressed in a turtleneck. On a 90-degree afternoon in Pasadena.") Keaton would later reprise her Annie Hall appearance when she attended the 2003 Academy Awards presentation in a men's tuxedo and a bowler hat. Keaton also became a frequent target of fashion critic Mr. Blackwell, having made his annual "Worst Dressed List" on five occasions.
Her photo by Douglas Kirkland appeared on the cover of the September 26, 1977, issue Time magazine with the story dubbing her "the funniest woman now working in films."
Later that year, she departed from her usual lighthearted comic roles when she accepted a role in the drama Looking for Mr. Goodbar, based on the novel by Judith Rossner. In the film she played a Catholic schoolteacher for deaf children who lives a double life, spending nights frequenting singles bars and engaging in promiscuous sex. Keaton became interested in the role after seeing it as a "psychological case history."
In addition to acting, Keaton has stated that "(I) had a lifelong ambition to be a singer." She had a brief, unrealized career as a recording artist in the 1970s. Her first record was an original cast recording of Hair, in 1971. In 1977 she began recording tracks for a solo album, but the finished record never materialized.
Keaton met with more success in the medium of still photography. Like her character in Annie Hall, Keaton had long relished photography as a favorite hobby, an interest she picked up as a teenager from her mother. While traveling in the late 70s she began exploring her avocation more seriously. "Rolling Stone had asked me to take photographs for them, and I thought, 'Wait a minute, what I'm really interested in is these lobbies, and these strange ballrooms in these old hotels.' So I began shooting them," she explained in 2003. "These places were deserted, and I could just sneak in anytime and nobody cared. It was so easy and I could do it myself. It was an adventure for me." Reservations, her collection of photos of hotel interiors, was published in book form in 1980.
After Manhattan in 1979, Keaton and Woody Allen ended their long working relationship, and the film would be their last major collaboration until 1993. In 1978 Keaton became romantically involved with Warren Beatty, and two years later he cast her to play opposite of him in Reds. In the film she played Louise Bryant, a journalist and repressed housewife in 1917, who flees from her husband to work with radical journalist John Reed (Beatty), and later enters Russia to locate him as he chronicles the Russian Civil War. The New York Times wrote that Keaton was, "nothing less than splendid as Louise Bryant - beautiful, selfish, funny and driven. It's the best work she has done to date." Keaton received her second Academy Award nomination for the film.
Beatty cast Keaton after seeing her in Annie Hall, as he wanted to bring her natural nervousness and insecure attitude to the role. The production of Reds was delayed several times since its conception in 1977, and Keaton almost left the project when she believed it would never be produced. Filming finally began two years later. In a 2006 Vanity Fair story, Keaton described her role as "the everyman of that piece, as someone who wanted to be extraordinary but was probably more ordinary ... I knew what it felt like to be extremely insecure." Assistant director Simon Relph later stated that Louise Bryant was one of her most difficult roles, and that "(she) almost got broken."
In 1984, The Little Drummer Girl, Keaton's unsuccessful first excursion into the thriller and action genre. The Little Drummer Girl was both a financial and critical failure, with critics claiming that Keaton was miscast for the genre, such as one review from The New Republic claiming that "the title role, the pivotal role, is played by Diane Keaton, and around her the picture collapses in tatters. She is so feeble, so inappropriate." Two years later she starred with Jessica Lange and Sissy Spacek in Crimes of the Heart, adapted from Beth Henley's Pulitzer Prize-winning play into a moderately successful screen comedy. She starred in her first commercial vehicle with 1987's Baby Boom, her first of four collaborations with writer-producer Nancy Meyers. In Baby Boom Keaton starred as a Manhattan career woman who is suddenly forced to care for a toddler. That same year she made a cameo in Allen's film Radio Days as a nightclub singer. 1988's The Good Mother was a misstep for Keaton. The film was a financial disappointment (According to Keaton, the film was "a Big Failure. Like, BIG failure"), and some critics panned her performance, such was one review from The Washington Post: "her acting degenerates into hype - as if she's trying to sell an idea she can't fully believe in."
In 1987, Keaton directed and edited her first feature film, a documentary named Heaven about the possibility of an afterlife. Heaven met with mixed critical reaction, with The New York Times likening it to "a conceit imposed on its subjects." Over the next four years, Keaton went on to direct music videos for artists such as Belinda Carlisle, two television films starring Patricia Arquette, and episodes of the series China Beach and Twin Peaks.
By the 1990s, Keaton had established herself as one of the most popular and versatile actresses in Hollywood. Now middle-aged, she shifted to more mature roles, frequently playing matriarchs of middle-class families. Of her role choices and avoidance of becoming typecast, she said: "Most often a particular role does you some good and Bang! You have loads of offers, all of them for similar roles ... I have tried to break away from the usual roles and have tried my hand at several things."
She began the decade with The Lemon Sisters, a poorly received comedy/drama that she starred in and produced, which was shelved for a year after its completion. In 1991, Keaton starred with Steve Martin in the 1991 family comedy Father of the Bride. She was almost not cast in the film, as the commercial failure of The Good Mother had strained her relationship with Walt Disney Pictures, the studio of both films. Father of the Bride was Keaton's first major hit after four years of commercial disappointments.
Keaton reprised her role four years later in the sequel, as a woman who becomes pregnant in middle age at the same time as her daughter. A review of the film for the San Francisco Examiner was one of many in which Keaton once again received comparison to Katharine Hepburn: "No longer relying on that stuttering uncertainty that seeped into all her characterizations of the 1970s, she has somehow become Katharine Hepburn with a deep maternal instinct, that is, she is a fine and intelligent actress who doesn't need to be tough and edgy in order to prove her feminism."
Keaton reprised her role of Kay Adams in 1990s The Godfather, Part III. Set 21 years after the events of The Godfather, Part II, Keaton's part had evolved into the estranged ex-wife of Michael Corleone. Criticism of the film and Keaton again centered on her character's unimportance in the film. The Washington Post wrote: "Even though she is authoritative in the role, Keaton suffers tremendously from having no real function except to nag Michael for his past sins." In 1993 Keaton starred in Manhattan Murder Mystery, her first film with Woody Allen since 1979. Her part was intended for Mia Farrow, but Farrow dropped out of the project after her notorious separation from Allen.
In 1995, Keaton directed Unstrung Heroes, her first theatrically released narrative film. The movie, adapted from Franz Lidz's memoir, starred Nathan Watt as a boy in 1960s whose mother (Andie MacDowell) becomes ill with cancer. As her sickness advances and his inventor father (John Turturro) grows increasingly distant, the boy is sent to live with his two eccentric uncles (Maury Chaykin and Michael Richards). In a geographic switch, Keaton shifted the story's setting from the New York of Lidz's book to the Southern California of her own childhood. Though it played in a relatively limited release and made little impression at the box office, the film and its direction were well-received critically.
Keaton's most successful film of the decade was the 1996 comedy The First Wives Club. She starred with Goldie Hawn and Bette Midler as a trio of "first wives": middle-aged women who had been divorced by their husbands in favor of younger women. Keaton claimed that making the film "saved [her] life." The film was a major success grossing US$105 million at the North American box office, and even developed a cult following among middle-aged women. Reviews of the film were generally positive for Keaton and her co-stars, and she was even referred to by The San Francisco Chronicle as "probably [one of the] the best comic film actresses alive."
Also in 1996, Keaton starred as a woman with leukemia in Marvin's Room, an adaptation of the play by Scott McPherson. Meryl Streep played her estranged sister. Roger Ebert stated that "Streep and Keaton, in their different styles, find ways to make Lee and Bessie into much more than the expression of their problems." Keaton earned her third Academy Award nomination for the film. Although critically acclaimed, the film was not released on a wide scale, possibly costing Keaton the Oscar. Keaton said that the biggest challenge of the role was understanding the mentality of a person with terminal illness.
Keaton's first film of 2000 was Hanging Up with Meg Ryan and Lisa Kudrow. Keaton also directed the film, despite claiming in a 1996 interview that she would never direct herself in a film, saying "[as a director] you automatically have different goals. I can't think about directing when I'm acting." The film was a drama about three sisters coping with the senility and eventual death of their elderly father. Hanging Up rated poorly with critics, and grossed a modest US$36 million at the North American box office.
In 2001 Keaton co-starred with Warren Beatty once again in Town & Country, a critical and financial fiasco. Budgeted at an estimated US$90 million, the film opened to little notice and grossed only $7 million in its North American theatrical run. Peter Travers of Rolling Stone claimed that Town & Country was, "less deserving of a review than it is an obituary ... The corpse took with it the reputations of its starry cast, including Warren Beatty [and] Diane Keaton".
In 2001 and 2002 Keaton starred in four low-budget television films. She played a fanatical nun in the religious drama Sister Mary Explains It All, an impoverished mother in the drama On Thin Ice, and a bookkeeper in the mob comedy Plan B. In Crossed Over she played Beverly Lowry, a woman who forms an unusual friendship with the first and only woman executed while on death row in Texas, Karla Faye Tucker.
Keaton's first major hit since 1996 came in 2003's Something's Gotta Give, directed by Nancy Meyers and co-starring Jack Nicholson. Nicholson and Keaton, aged 66 and 57 respectively, were seen as bold casting choices for leads in a romantic comedy. Twentieth Century Fox, the film's original studio, reportedly declined to produce the film, fearing that the lead characters were too old to be bankable. Keaton commented about the situation in Ladies' Home Journal: "Let's face it, people my age and Jack's age are much deeper, much more soulful, because they've seen a lot of life. They have a great deal of passion and hope- why shouldn't they fall in love? Why shouldn't movies show that?" Keaton played a middle-aged playwright who falls in love with her daughter's much older boyfriend. The film was a major success at the box office, grossing US$125 million in North America. Roger Ebert wrote that "[Nicholson and Keaton] bring so much experience, knowledge and humor to their characters that the film works in ways the screenplay might not have even hoped for." The following year, Keaton received her fourth Academy Award nomination for her role in the film.
Most recently, Keaton starred in the moderately successful 2005 comedy The Family Stone with Sarah Jessica Parker. Her latest film, Because I Said So, co-starring Mandy Moore, opened on February 2, 2007 to poor reviews.
Keaton has also served as a producer on films and television series. She produced the FOX series Pasadena, which was cancelled after airing only four episodes in 2001 but later completed its run on cable in 2005. In 2003 she produced the Gus Van Sant drama Elephant, about a school shooting. On why she produced the film, she said: "It really makes me think about my responsibilities as an adult to try and understand what's going on with young people."
Outside of the film industry, Keaton has continued to pursue her interest in photography. As a collector, she told Vanity Fair in 1987: "I have amassed a huge library of images - kissing scenes from movies, pictures I like. Visual things are really key for me." She has published several more collections of her own photographs, and has also served as an editor for collections of vintage photography. Works she has edited in the last decade include a book of photographs by paparazzo Ron Galella, an anthology of reproductions of clown paintings, and a collection of photos of California's Spanish Colonial and Mission-style houses.
Keaton has also established herself as a real estate developer. She has resold several mansions in Southern California after renovating and redesigning them. One of her clients is Madonna, who purchased a US$6.5 million Beverly Hills mansion from Keaton in 2003. She will receive the Film Society of Lincoln Center's Gala Tribute in 2007.