Don’t Give Up On Yourself: Diane Keaton, 1946-2025

But really, when I picture Diane Keaton, I just see Diane Keaton. Oh, Father of the Bride was the first thing I saw her in, but it seems to me she was always just there. That I didn’t see a movie of hers until high school seems impossible, but other than a few minutes of one from Director Who Shall Remain Nameless on Bravo, when that was still the sort of thing you’d get on Bravo, it seems to be true. I saw her as a director before I ever saw her as an actress, and I can’t help wondering what she would have thought about that.

I do not blame her for some of the bad acting in her Twin Peaks episode, “Slaves and Masters,” because you couldn’t get good acting in the James subplot. And I quite like the Belinda Carlisle videos she directed—she did “Heaven is a Place on Earth” and “I Get Weak.” And she got that great “I’m worried about Coop!” out of Miguel Ferrer. She didn’t do a ton of directing, but she did some, and after all she’d been in some of the most praised movies of her generation and presumably had watched the men who directed her.

Because as Keaton was very firm, her life in Hollywood was different because she was a woman. She spent time in men’s shadows, with no one being particularly interested in her at all, and she didn’t like it. Perhaps that’s why she stopped dating decades ago, adopted children, and only had male friends and not a romantic partner. But then she was also clear that she was happy in that life, and she didn’t need a relationship to feel fulfilled. She utterly rejected the myth of the lonely old maid, though she was also pretty clear that she closed herself off a lot and was hard to get to know anyway.

She’s fascinating in The Godfather, being so Middle America and wholesome-looking. She’s the life Michael wants, the one that has nothing to do with the family business. And when he is pulled away from her and that door closes, that’s the end of that life for him. He’s never going to be in Kay’s world. We talk a lot about the men in that movie, and let’s be real that Coppola is one of the many directors of his era who focused on men. But we should not sleep on Diane Keaton’s performance in those movies.

She was a director and an actress and a photographer and a singer. She was in the original Broadway Hair. She dated some of the most notable actors of her generation and went on to live a life as a fulfilled single woman. Diane Keaton was an icon. She had a fashion sense all her own and didn’t care if other people liked it or not, just what she wanted to wear. If she was hard to get to know, well, so are a lot of people. And it must be frustrating to have fans ignore that you want to be a private person even if you’re a rampant extrovert, which fewer actors are than people realize. Diane Keaton was one of a kind.