Her name really was Annie Hall. ‘Di-Annie’ was one of her father Jack Hall’s affectionate nicknames for her.
And she really did dress every day in turtleneck sweaters and a wide-brimmed bowler hat. Asked about her trademark style, she’d claim that the hat hid her ‘thin, stringy’ hair and the sweaters were worn as sunblock.
When co-star and close friend Bette Midler said of Diane Keaton yesterday, ‘What you saw was who she was,’ that was the truth. ‘She was hilarious, a complete original, and completely without guile, or any of the competitiveness one would have expected from such a star,’ Midler added.
But in more candid moments, Keaton – who died at her Los Angeles home on Saturday, aged 79 – admitted she used her clothing as ‘a wall around my vulnerability. More hats. Long-sleeved everything. Coats in the summer. Scarves at the beach.
‘Woody [Allen] said it best in a phone message: ‘I’m standing in front of your house. It’s very beautiful. I’d like to get in, but I don’t have a hammer.’ ‘
But then Keaton always felt like she never fitted in. The daughter of a real estate agent father and housewife mother Dorothy (crowned Mrs Los Angeles 1954), she grew up in suburban Santa Ana, California, and described herself as an ‘odd kid’.
She joined the drama club at Santa Ana High School before leaving for theatre college in New York City, where her big break came in the form of an understudy role in the all-nude Broadway musical Hair.
Despite love affairs with some of Hollywood’s most successful male leads, including Al Pacino and Warren Beatty as well as Allen himself, she never married. When asked why, she replied: ‘No one ever asked.’ But, in truth, the idea of being a stay-at-home wife like Dorothy horrified her.
Diane Keaton attends the LA Premiere of Love The Coopers at Los Angeles venue The Grove in 2015
Diane with her ex Warren Beatty in 1979
Her breakout came in 1972 with The Godfather, where she portrayed Kay Adams-Corleone opposite Al Pacino
Instead, she adopted a daughter and a son, Dexter and Duke, in her 50s and raised them as a single mother. The intensity of the love they ignited in her, she said, was far greater than anything she’d experienced with a man.
Heartfelt tributes poured in after her death, which was largely unexpected by her friends in the industry. Allen, 89, did not comment publicly, but a friend said he was ‘extremely distraught and surprised and upset’ at her death.
They met in 1969, when Diane was 23 and had taken her mother’s maiden name as her stage name. She was cast in the first production of Allen’s comedy romance Play It Again, Sam.
He played a film critic, falling in love with his best friend’s wife, and as he and Keaton flirted every night on stage, a sexual attraction kindled. ‘He couldn’t help himself,’ she later remarked. ‘He loved neurotic girls.’
On their first dinner date, he winced and yelped when her knife grated against the plate.
‘I couldn’t figure out how to cut my steak without making the same mistake,’ she wrote in a letter to her mother, ‘so I stopped eating and started talking about women’s status in the arts. What an idiot. The whole thing was humiliating. I doubt we’ll be having dinner together again any time soon.’
The scene could be one from Annie Hall, the 1977 movie Allen wrote and directed, based on their five-year relationship. Her character – self-deprecating, intellectual yet often tongue-tied, desperate to please but fiercely independent – was an accurate portrait.
Her family – including her brother Randy, a frustrated poet (played on screen by Christopher Walken as a tormented oddball) – were less thrilled with their portrayals.
Annie Hall earned Keaton her only Oscar, despite three other nominations, and fixed her public image for ever as a ditzy, impulsive woman who was hobbled by her irrational insecurities.
Wrapped up in his career and in love with his own cleverness, Allen had no idea how deep those insecurities ran. Neither did Dorothy Hall, though she fretted in her diary that her daughter seemed to be constantly eating – ‘always chewing a big mouthful or sucking candy. I wish I knew how she stays so thin.’
Diane adopted two children — daughter Dexter and son Duke — in her 50s; (Dexter Keaton, Diane, and Duke Keaton in 2022)
Keaton became a household name thanks to her starring roles in hit films such as Annie Hall (pictured with Woody Allen)
A family spokesperson confirmed to People that the Oscar-winning actress passed away in California; (seen in 1996′ First Wives Club with Goldie Hawn and Bette Midler)
Diane Keaton, one of Hollywood’s most distinctive and beloved stars, died at the age of 79; (seen in 2023)
In fact, she was in the throes of a serious eating disorder, bulimia, which saw her consuming up to 20,000 calories a day and purging herself by vomiting.
At her worst, she ate a dozen muffins with three fried eggs and bacon for breakfast, with pancakes and chocolate milk, followed by three buttered steaks for lunch with baked potatoes on the side, and apple pie with two chocolate sundaes for dessert.
Dinner was a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken and chips with blue cheese, then a jar of peanut brittle, a pound cake, packets of chocolate-covered almonds and a bottle of fizzy pop, with three banana cream pies as a snack before bed. The constant cycle of bingeing and purging caused serious health problems, including low blood pressure, heartburn and more than two dozen tooth cavities.
Unaware of her illness, but an enthusiastic advocate of therapy for all, Allen persuaded her to see a psychiatrist. Through talking, Keaton realised she had been deeply dissatisfied with her physical appearance since adolescence; as a 14-year-old, she used to sleep with hair grips on her nose, hoping to straighten out a bump. The trigger for bulimia had been the role in Hair, for which she was expected to lose 10lb for the part.
After six months of therapy, she overcame her bulimia, channelling her obsessive personality into other obsessions such as clothes and accumulating.
Annie Hall was a huge box office success, spending more than a year in cinemas. Her affair with Allen was over by the time it appeared, though she continued to make movies with him – eight in total, including Sleeper, Manhattan, Love And Death, and Radio Days.
Decades later, when Allen was accused of sexually abusing his own child (an accusation he forcefully denied), Keaton stood by him. ‘I believe my friend,’ she said. ‘I love him.’
Then came a grande affaire with Warren Beatty, Hollywood’s most notorious lothario. He called her on Christmas Eve, at the height of her Annie Hall fame, and wooed her insistently.
Beatty didn’t need to be told that she had fancied him since her teens. He expected that of every woman.
‘Under his gaze,’ she said, ‘I suddenly became the most captivating person in the world. He fed on every nuance of my lopsided face and saw beauty.’
Diane with her First Wives Club costars Goldie Hawn and Better Midler in 1996
‘I fell, and I kept falling for a long time,’ she said.
But Beatty ‘needed a lot of nurturing, and I needed as much as he did. That’s not a good mix.’
As his interest in her burned out, she was left bereft. Filming the 1984 adaptation of John le Carre’s novel The Little Drummer Girl in Berlin, she carried a magazine photo of him in her jacket pocket. When she needed to cry for a scene, she took it out, unfolded it, kissed it, and the tears started.
Al Pacino was another great love of Keaton’s life, with the pair dating on and off again from 1974 to 1990. Aged 25, she had met him on the set of the first part of The Godfather trilogy – her Hollywood breakout role as Kay, the girlfriend of his character, the gangster Michael Corleone.
She was instantly attracted to him, but he was in a relationship with actress Tuesday Weld.
‘It was too bad he wasn’t available,’ she lamented, ‘but neither was I.’
For years, she nursed a crush on him.
Once they became a couple, she said she was ‘mad for him’.
In the following years, they broke up, then reconciled, then broke up again, more than a dozen times, in a self-destructive loop.
In 1990, during the making of The Godfather Part III, she gave him an ultimatum: either they married or the relationship was over. They split for good.
To the end of her life, she continued to be in demand as an actress, co-starring with Jude Law for TV’s The Young Pope in 2016, and with Jane Fonda and Candice Bergen in Book Club two years later.
While she was privately going through a health battle, she had listed her ‘dream home’ in Los Angeles for sale in March (pictured)
The actress starred alongside a youthful Leonardo DiCaprio in Marvin’s Room (pictured)
She also portrayed Michael Corleone’s long-suffering wife in all three Godfather films (pictured in The Godfather: Part II)
But she earned far more as a property developer, buying and renovating dozens of LA houses and amassing an estimated fortune of $100 million.
But a sense of regret persisted that she’d never found a lifelong partner. The men she chose, she said, ‘needed the right kind of woman. Managerial skills are necessary to handle men like that, and I’m not the manager type.’
While she was reconciled to the splits from Beatty and Pacino, she recalled the years fondly when she and Allen would sit in Central Park, watching the passers-by and making guesses about their lives.
‘I miss Woody,’ she told the Daily Mail in 2011. ‘He’d cringe if he knew how much I care about him, but I’m smart enough not to broach the subject. I know he’s borderline repulsed by the grotesque nature of my affection.
‘What am I supposed to do? I still love him.’
