Diane Keaton

Diane Keaton's first major film role was Kay Adams in The Godfather in 1972 - the outsider who marries into the family and slowly understands what she has married into. It is a quiet part in an enormous film, and it would have been enough on its own to establish a career.

But the work that shaped her was elsewhere. Beginning with Play It Again, Sam in the same year, and continuing through Sleeper in 1973 and Love and Death in 1975, she built a comic persona that had no obvious precedent - nervy, self-interrupting, funny in a way that seemed to be happening by accident. Nobody on screen had talked quite like that before.

Then 1977, which is the year the whole thing lands. Annie Hall won her the Academy Award for Best Actress at the ceremony held on 3 April 1978, and the film took Best Picture and Best Director as well. The character's wardrobe - the ties, the waistcoats, the men's tailoring worn without apology - moved off the screen and into ordinary shops within months. Very few performances have that effect on how people actually dress.

In the same year she took the opposite turn entirely with Looking for Mr. Goodbar, a dark and violent drama that deliberately dismantled the persona Annie Hall had just built. Doing both inside twelve months is the clearest possible statement of what she could do. She died on 11 October 2025, at seventy-nine.