Diane Keaton was in a league of her own.
The vibrant, inimical actress — who played roles from standout ingenue in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, for which she won an Oscar, to force-of-nature matriarch in movies like Father of the Bride and Something’s Gotta Give — was celebrated as a pioneer for women by scores of Hollywood luminaries after her death at 79 on Saturday.
“Man … you defined womanhood,” Viola Davis wrote in an Instagram post. “The pathos, humor, levity, your ever-present youthfulness and vulnerability — you tattooed your SOUL into every role, making it impossible to imagine anyone else inhabiting them.”
Bette Midler, who costarred with Keaton in First Wives’ Club, said Keaton stood out for her lack of competitiveness in a notoriously cutthroat business.
“I cannot tell you how unbearably sad this makes me,” Midler wrote in her own post. “She was hilarious, a complete original and completely without guile, or any of the competitiveness one would have expected from such a star. What you saw was who she was…oh, la, lala!”
Keaton, whose film career spanned nearly six decades, also marched to the beat of her own drum in her personal life — she never married and adopted two children, daughter Dexter and son Duke, when she was in her fifties. She attributed her own mother as the reason she decided to stay independent.
“She was just the best mother, but I think that she is the reason why I didn’t get married,” Keaton told Interview magazine in 2021. “I didn’t want to give up my independence.”
She added, in her self-effacing manner, “By the way, no one has ever asked me to marry them, either, so that might be a good answer. I should’ve started with that and called it a day.”
Jane Fonda wrote that Keaton’s original sense of style shined through in several ways.
“It’s hard to believe … or accept … that Diane has passed,” Fonda wrote in a post. “She was always a spark of life and light, constantly giggling at her own foibles, being limitlessly creative … in her acting, her wardrobe, her books, her friends, her homes, her library, her worldview. Unique is what she was. And, though she didn’t know it or wouldn’t admit it, man she was a fine actress!”
Close friend and Grammy- and Oscar-winning songwriter Carole Bayer Sager said she saw Keaton a few weeks before her death and was surprised at how thin she looked. Keaton had been displaced after wildfires tore through California in January.
“She had to go to Palm Springs because her house had been damaged inside, and they had to clean everything,” Sager told People. “She was down there for a while, and when she came back, I was kind of stunned by how much weight she’d lost.”
But Sager added that she’ll remember how Keaton was “a magic light for everyone.”
“I just loved her,” Sager said. “She was so special, she just lit up a room with her energy. She was happy and upbeat and taking photographs of everything she saw. She was completely creative; she never stopped creating.”