Goodbye Girl

 La dee dah, la dee dah.

This was the sound my head made after I read the news that Diane Keaton had passed away. Interesting to me that I could so easily separate her from the tangled mess that has become my feelings about Woody Allen, but Ms. Keaton was far more than simply Woody's muse. 

Please remember that before she ever appeared any any of Woody's movies she played the long-suffering wife of Michael Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather. She came to Francis straight from the Broadway stage version of Hair. 

Then she started hanging out with Woody. It is interesting to me to note that one of her most quintessential performances came in 1977 in the title role of Annie Hall, released just a few months later was one of her more intense and gritty portrayals of a young school teacher of deaf children who becomes lost in a haze of promiscuity and drugs Looking For Mister Goodbar. In the world of acting we call this "range." 

That was nearly fifty years ago. Diane's last movie was 2024's Summer Camp, in a part that she spent the last thirty years perfecting: A woman of a certain age who is attempting to reconnect with that part of her life that she was missing. Usually with an ensemble featuring other stars whose careers had calmed down a notch, but winning an Academy Award will keep your name on a short list for quite a while. 

Especially if you're as talented as Diane Keaton. She was The Little Drummer Girl. She was Mrs. Soffel. She played mothers and sisters and wives, but mostly she was Diane Keaton. Tough, funny, confused, and to hear her tell it still best friends with her most frequent collaborator. So what if she spent the last couple decades playing off Steve Martin in remakes of family comedies from the 1950s? 

Because Diane Keaton was a treasure. She was in as many Godfather films as Al Pacino. She went to to toe with Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson and made it look like fierce fun. And she directed movies too. Like her documentary, Heaven. And she was nominated for four Oscars, taking one home for Annie Hall. Plus a boatload of other prizes and honors that she self-deprecatingly dismissed in her own inimitable style. 

She didn't stomp on the Terra so much as glide across it, leaving an impression much greater than you might have guessed. She will be missed. 

Aloha, Diane. 

La dee dah.