“Annie Hall” director Woody Allen penned a tribute to the late, great Diane Keaton that was published on Sunday by Bari Weiss’ The Free Press. It came after Keaton died at the age of 79 on Saturday.
“It’s grammatically incorrect to say ‘most unique,’ but all rules of grammar, and I guess anything else, are suspended when talking about Diane Keaton,” Allen’s tribute began. “Unlike anyone the planet has experienced or is unlikely to ever see again, her face and laugh illuminated any space she entered.”
The filmmaker’s piece includes small anecdotes from his romance with Keaton, which began when the two were starring in a production of his play, “Play It Again, Sam,” at the Morosco Theatre together. “I first laid eyes on her lanky beauty at an audition and thought, ‘If Huckleberry Finn was a gorgeous young woman, he’d be Keaton,’” Allen remembered. “For the first week of rehearsal we never spoke a word to one another. She was shy, I was shy, and with two shy people things can get pretty dull.”
It was during a shared lunch break that Allen said the two shared their first real, personal moment together. “She was so charming, so beautiful, so magical, that I questioned my sanity. I thought: ‘Could I be in love so quickly?,’” the filmmaker recalled. Eventually, he began showing her early cuts of his films. “As time went on I made movies for an audience of one, Diane Keaton,” Allen wrote. “I never read a single review of my work and cared only what Keaton had to say about it.”
Throughout her career, Keaton starred in eight of Allen’s 50 films, including “Annie Hall,” “Manhattan” and “Manhattan Murder Mystery.” She won the Best Actress Oscar in 1978 for her performance in “Annie Hall.”
In his Sunday piece, Allen praised Keaton’s fashion sense, as well as her many talents as an actress, writer, dancer, singer, photographer and artist. He also looked back on a Thanksgiving he spent with Keaton and her family in Orange County, which ended with the group playing a humble game of penny poker.
“It was amazing that this beautiful yokel went on to become an award-winning actress and sophisticated fashion icon,” the filmmaker wrote. “We had a few great personal years together and finally we both moved on, and why we parted only God and Freud might be able to figure out.” Allen said he used to joke with Keaton that she would end up like Gloria Swanson’s Norma Desmond and him like Erich von Stroheim in Billy Wilder’s “Sunset Boulevard,” meaning, “once her director, now her chauffeur.”
“A few days ago the world was a place that included Diane Keaton,” Allen concluded. “Now it’s a world that does not. Hence, it’s a drearier world. Still, there are her movies. And her great laugh still echoes in my head.”
Allen has been married to Soon-Yi Previn, one of the adopted children of his former partner Mia Farrow, since 1997. Their relationship began while Allen was still with Farrow. That fact, combined with the allegations that he sexually abused his and Farrow’s adopted daughter Dylan, have made Allen an increasingly controversial figure within Hollywood over the past few decades. While Allen has consistently denied the sexual abuse allegations against him, they gained new traction during the #MeToo movement of 2017 and ’18.
Keaton, for her part, remained a staunch defender of Allen’s throughout the later part of her life. Not only did she accept Allen’s Cecil B. DeMille Award for him at the 2014 Golden Globes, but she also defended him on Twitter in 2018, writing, “Woody Allen is my friend and I continue to believe him.” The actress then recommended that her followers watch a 1992 interview Allen did on “60 Minutes” in which he refuted the allegations against him.
Allen, meanwhile, made a rare public Hollywood appearance in 2017 to help present Keaton her AFI Lifetime Achievement Award. “From the minute I met her, she was a great, great inspiration to me,” Allen said of Keaton at the ceremony. “Much of what I have accomplished in my life, I owe for sure to her.”
