The first time I met the legendary actress and director Diane Keaton, who died on Saturday in her native Los Angeles, aged 79, she was wearing a lot of clothes (hat, turtleneck, leggings, skirt, wide belt, ballet flats, all either grey or black) and holding a ribbon-wrapped confectionery box. In one seamless motion, she shook my hand, sat on the sofa and plumped a cushion, talking the entire time.
“Hi, I’m Diane, nice to meet you, have you had these?” she asked. This was 2007; salted caramels were a new thing. “They’re caramels, but they’re made with salt. They’re salted. They’re the best things you’ll ever eat. I’ll give you one. One, but that’s it.” She dug two long fingers into the cellophane box. “Notice how I won’t let you pick it. This is the way I always was with my sisters, too. Okay. What do we want? Tea with honey? Green. Here you go. I hope you got a salty one.”
That’s the way it was with Ms. Keaton, on and off screen. She was a brilliant actor, delivering indelible performances in generation-defining films – The Godfather trilogy, Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Reds, Baby Boom, The First Wives Club, Something’s Gotta Give, and the eight movies she made with Woody Allen, including Manhattan and Annie Hall. She won a best actress Oscar for that, and started a fashion craze for menswear on women. But she always inhabited her singular self.
2011: Diane Keaton on Woody, Warren and, most of all, mom
Born Diane Hall in Los Angeles in 1946, she adored her civil engineer father, Jack – he called her Diannie, which Mr. Allen cribbed – and her homemaker mother, Dorothy (Keaton was her maiden name), who devoted herself to Diane and her three siblings. Ms. Keaton got her first taste of showbiz when Dorothy entered the Mrs. America contest in the 1950s; she won Mrs. Los Angeles, and was a finalist for Mrs. California.
In 2011, as Dorothy struggled with Alzheimer’s disease, Ms. Keaton wrote a memoir comparing their lives, Then Again. She showed me the stacks of journals her mother had kept, 100 brick-thick books crammed with clippings, doodles, ticket stubs, photos.
“You don’t write all that unless you need to say, ‘I’m here and I want to express what it meant to me,’” Ms. Keaton told me. “I have tremendous feeling for that.” She later wrote two more memoirs, Let’s Just Say it Wasn’t Pretty (2014) and Brother & Sister: A Memoir (2020).
Ms. Keaton made her Broadway debut in Hair in 1968 – she was the only cast member who kept her clothes on in the nude scenes, and later admitted that she suffered from bulimia. She earned a Tony nomination for her role in Mr. Allen’s 1969 Broadway version of Play It Again, Sam. Playing Michael Corleone’s wife, Kay, in The Godfather (1972), the dawning horror on her face fills one of the last frames. It launched her into stardom.
2010: Diane Keaton: Facing up to the fact that something's gotta give
She made a career out of embodying her generation’s concerns as she aged. In the 1970s, in her 30s, she played outspoken free spirits for better and worse, in Annie Hall, Manhattan and Looking for Mr. Goodbar. “Annie Hall was an effortless movie for me to perform,” she told me. “Ef-fort-less! There was no, ‘I’ve got to live up to this part,’ or expectation from it, at all. It was just [snaps fingers].”
In the 1980s, she played a wife facing down her husband’s adultery in Shoot the Moon and a business executive struggling with new motherhood in Baby Boom. At 50, she played a woman whose husband dumped her for a younger model in The First Wives Club (1996), and at 57, she fell in love again in Something’s Gotta Give (2003) – which netted her fourth Oscar nomination. In her later years, she played women who won’t go down without a fight, in the Book Club and Father of the Bride franchises.
She let herself age naturally, but never judged anyone else: “I think everybody has so many odd feelings about how they look,” she told me. “If you want to fix it, good luck. But it can’t last. You just don’t want to spend your life thinking about it too much.”
Ms. Keaton had a thousand interests outside of acting, too: Her directorial debut was the documentary Heaven (1987), about people’s visions of an afterlife. Aside from her memoirs, she published several rather eccentric books, including a collection of her own photos of hotel lobbies, and one on clown painting. She served on the board of the Los Angeles Conservancy, which fights to preserve local architecture, and she designed a line of home accessories. She bought, restored and sold (at impressive profit) California Spanish houses (she was partial to archways and tons of natural light).
Diane Keaton, Goldie Hawn and Bette Midler, who all starred in the movie 'The First Wives Club,' rehearse for the 69th Academy Awards in 1997.TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP/Getty Images
Aged 50, single, she adopted a daughter, Dexter, followed by a son, Duke, three years later. Her kids rolled their eyes when she’d drive them to school barefoot, and she strung clotheslines across her kitchens, to which she’d clip their art. She wrote much of Then Again while sitting in her car, waiting for her kids to finish swimming practice.
“Children, oh, they crush you to the core of your being, don’t they?” Ms. Keaton told me. “But that’s what love is, isn’t it? Pain and beauty. It gets more and more intense for me. I’m so surprised by it.”
Though she never married – she never wanted to – she had long-term relationships with three of her co-stars, Mr. Allen, Al Pacino and Warren Beatty, about whom she told me a great story. He once drove Ms. Keaton, who was terrified of flying, to the airport, walked her to her gate, and then, to her astonishment, got on the plane with her. He held her hand all the way to New York, kissed her goodbye and got the next plane back home. She was that lovable.
She told me she enjoyed the energy around powerful men, but she didn’t want to be with any one of them forever – she wanted to be the powerful one: “I was always worried, am I going to get lost in this? Am I going to be myself, or am I going to be constantly saying, ‘Ha, your jokes are so funny.’”
Diane Keaton through the years
2012: For Diane Keaton, aging is to laugh
When I’d reach out to her co-stars for a magazine story, almost everyone called me back (that is rare).
Mr. Allen called her “a great actress with virtually no limits.”
Lisa Kudrow, whom Ms. Keaton directed in Hanging Up (2000), told me, “She’s never withholding, but there’s always more of her to uncover.”
Callie Khouri, who directed Ms. Keaton in Mad Money, said, “Diane can take anything and make it funny, and still convey that human, vulnerable quality that makes everyone love her.”
Ms. Keaton’s work meant a lot to me, too. Her women were sexy, restless, itchy, charming. They spoke their minds. They made mistakes. She never played a scene the way anyone else would, and she was always right. Images of her will play in my mind forever: the way her face collapses instead of lighting up when she finally sees Mr. Beatty on the train platform in Reds. The way she smokes a joint in the tub in Shoot the Moon. The way she turns arguing into foreplay in Love and Death. The madcap scene where she dumps her tiny daughter at the coat check in Baby Boom. Her cackling with Frances McDormand and Amanda Peet in Something’s Gotta Give. The way her mesmerizing, almond-shaped eyes would suddenly go soft with love.
“I always felt that in some way I was ordinary,” she told me. “That in spite of my being borderline odd, women felt I was more like one of them.” La di da forever, Diane. We were lucky to have you.