Diane Keaton Had My Heart

This weekend, we lost Diane Keaton, that piece of American heart, Hollywood's darling hummingbird.
Thank God she is still alive in her films.
Aseem Chhabra on the Hollywood star he was in love with.

As with most fans of Diane Keaton, I also fell in love with her -- like crazy, deeply in love with a movie star, when I saw her in Annie Hall at Delhi's Archana Cinema.

Diane had my heart.

She was unlike any other actress.

She had this lightness quality to her.

She would giggle in between dialogues.

Her voice would sing notes that sounded like birds chirping.

She had her own style, personality and she made sure Hollywood would accept her as she was.

In 2017, speaking at the American Film Institute tribute to Diane, Meryl Streep said that as Annie Hall, she had a stream of conscience of a hummingbird, with her head going in different directions.

'She's so hard to capture, she's in flight.'

I have seen Annie Hall (1977) a number of times since that first viewing in Delhi's Greater Kailash neighbourhood.

A few years ago, I watched the film with my filmmaker friend Dev Benegal in New York's Museum of Moving Image theatre. He was surprised at how I could always predict when Annie Hall would suddenly say 'la di da'.

I knew her, plus the film's dialogues by heart. And I would spout those lines at all sorts of silly moments.

Her clothes in Annie Hall were so creative -- men's shirts, baggy pants, sometimes pleated, men's vests, a tie or a scarf.

Ruth Morley was credited as the costume designer for Annie Hall, the four Oscars winning film, including the Best Actress win for Diane.

But I am certain Diane brought her own touch to the clothes she wore in the film. It became her style.

She would always dress in similar clothes, sometimes with a big hat and a blazer.

Over the decades since Annie Hall was released, Diane would be referred to as a fashion icon.

The New York Times said this weekend, 'Her styling (in Annie Hall) was so immediately idiosyncratic that it tells you everything you need to know about her character.'

In one of the early scenes in the film, Annie said that the tie she was wearing was gifted to her by Grammy Hall.

'What Grammy Hall?' her co-star Woody Allen (playing the neurotic Alvy Singer) asked her.

Woody was also the director and co-writer of the of the film.

'What are you, what you do? Grow up in a Norman Rockwell painting?'

Diane Keaton was as American as a Norman Rockwell painting.

America of the 1970s, 1980s and even beyond cannot be described without a nod to the characters Diane created, especially in films written and directed by Woody Allen.

This was when he was Hollywood's and New York's greatest, zaniest comic filmmaker, before his private and public life got messed up with allegations of sexual abuse.

This weekend, we lost Diane Keaton, that piece of American heart, Hollywood’s darling hummingbird.

Thank God she is still alive in her films.

I first noticed Diane -- as did most Americans -- when she played the beautifully put together Kay Adams in The Godfather.

She was the surprise guest with Michael Corleone (a most handsome Al Pacino) at his sister Connie's wedding.

Kay stood out morally upright and quite naïve, among the loud, sleezy criminals, the Corleones and their friends.

She did so in all the three films Francis Ford Coppola made to narrate the epic saga conceived by Mario Puzo.

Despite the all-round superb performances by a large ensemble cast, the ending of The Godfather -- the first film -- belonged to Diane and the look on her face.

As the door shut on her, she knew, her gut told her that Michael had lied to her.

No dialogue was spoken. The screen just went black.

Diane mostly made me laugh, whether in her big Hollywood productions, Something's Gotta Give (2003) where she played Jack Nicholson's love interest or And So it Goes (2014) where she was paired with Michael Douglas.

But she gave her best in Woody Allen's films. They worked on seven films together.

I was thoroughly amused by Diane's take of Sonja in Love and Death (1975), a character trapped in the world similar to those created by Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky.

There is the hilarious monologue -- a very Woody Allen-like take on the classic Russian novels -- where Sonja (Diane) says to Boris (Woody): 'To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love, but then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer, not to love is to suffer, to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love, to be happy then is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be unhappy one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness.'

I loved Diane in Warren Beatty's Oscar-winning epic Reds (1981), where she played John Reed's lover Louise Bryant.

John, an American communist journalist, had been missing in the post-Bolshevik revolution Russia and Lousie searched for him everywhere.

Until that last scene at a train station -- like so many such predictable, yet emotionally rousing scenes where lost couples unite -- when the two see each other on the crowded platform.

For once, Diane, playing Louise, made me cry.

She was shockingly brilliant as a schoolteacher cruising bars, looking for male hookups in Richard Brooks' Looking For Mr Goodbar (1977). Richard Gere co-starred with her in that film.

I was fortunate to see Diane in person one time.

It was December 1984, nearly 41 years ago, although I remember it like it was yesterday.

I was in Los Angeles seated inside a movie theatre in the Westwood Village.

I was about to see Alan Parker's Birdy with Nicolas Cage and Matthew Modine.

Just when the lights began to dim, Diane walked into the theatre with a man. She was carrying a bucket of popcorn.

She sat down a couple of rows ahead of me.

Throughout the film, I could see the silhouette of her head against the screen in front of me.

When the film finished, the entire audience was devastated by the plunge Modine's Birdy took. There was probably not one dry eye in the theatre.

As the lights came on, Diane and her partner rushed out of the theatre. I noticed she was quickly wiping her tears.

My hummingbird cried just like I did at the end of that film.

At that moment, the star, my crush and I were alike -- two human beings who had been impacted by that wonderful film's tragic ending.

Photographs curated by Satish Bodas/Rediff