Opinion Diane Keaton: Star light, star bright

In 2017, at the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award ceremony for Diane Keaton, Meryl Streep recalled a childhood memory — of visiting New York’s Museum of Natural History with her siblings. One exhibit stood out: An outsized, transparent woman made of lucite, hands outstretched, unapologetically naked. “You could see her guts and her heart and her brain and she was breathtaking. Diane Keaton, arguably the most covered-up person in the history of clothes, is also a transparent woman. There’s nobody who stands more exposed, more undefended, and just willing to show herself inside and out than Diane,” Streep said. It was a fitting metaphor. Keaton, who died this week aged 79, stood out not just as the face of American New Wave cinema, but for a rare kind of emotional candour — on screen and off it.

Across more than five decades, Keaton built a filmography defined by disarming authenticity. In movies such as Annie Hall (1977), Reds (1981), and Something’s Gotta Give (2003), she reimagined the contours of feminine experience. Her characters stammered, flailed, and loved with abandon, without guarantees; they were messy, intellectual, yearning and imperfect women who refused to be tidied up. Whether opposite Woody Allen in Manhattan (1979), or as the emotionally unravelling wife in Shoot the Moon (1982), Keaton made vulnerability electric.

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Off-screen, Keaton remained steadfast in her refusal to flatten her quirks. Her signature androgynous style — hats, waistcoats, neckties, tailored suits — became a visual shorthand for her singularity. That sense of presence, of living fully in contradiction, without apology or neat endings, ran through everything she did. For all her idiosyncrasies, or perhaps because of them, Keaton offered something rare: A life and a body of work that made space for complexity, and in doing so, made it beautiful.