Diane Keaton's Shadows and Light

"The critic David Thomson, in his outrageous, brilliant, poignant, and often very funny book " The New Biographical Dictionary of Film," talks about how some stars radiate a kind of preternatural goodness, which, presumably, casts its own kind of light on the audience. Not the beautiful, shadowy doom that Montgomery Clift brought to the screen, for instance, or the troubled, mischievous sharpness that Jeffrey Wright and Regina Hall lend to their work, but something as warming as sunshine and just as seductive."

"And while Diane Keaton, who died on October 11th, at the age of seventy-nine, will be remembered for the charm of her attitude toward comedy- How did I, a nice-enough girl from Santa Ana, end up here? Why, and how, am I doing this?-it's the essential goodness that characterizes all her work, the sunshine that breaks through the fog of confusion, that will stay with us most powerfully."

"We loved her for her ambivalence about performing, how she wanted to be seen even as she ran from it, hiding her face under the brim of a hat, or behind tinted glasses, or in the arms of one of her onscreen lovers. It was the nuance of that ambivalence that kept us in our seats, and sometimes on the edge of them, because we'd all been there when it came to love or power: Is this mine to have and to hold? Or should I give it back?"

Some stars radiate a preternatural goodness that casts its own kind of light. Diane Keaton embodied an essential goodness and a comic attitude marked by self-questioning and restraint. Her ambivalence about performing—wanting recognition while deflecting the spotlight—became a defining, seductive quality. She often hid behind hats, glasses, or lovers, conveying the tension between desire and refusal. That nuanced ambivalence resonated with audiences confronting love and power. Keaton avoided the hunger for fame seen in other stars and maintained a career longevity comparable to top male contemporaries, a rarity for female actors in Hollywood.

Read at The New Yorker