Diane Keaton Reached for Beauty Below the Surface

October 12, 2025 Michael Olesker

Here's Looking at You, Kid: Diane Keaton is shown here with Woody Allen (center) and Jerry lacy in a scene from the 1973 film, "Play It Again, Sam." (Wikipedia)

We get a little lucky with movie stars. Their lives may end, but they stay with us on our TV screens and laptops.

Diane Keaton died over the weekend, at 79, but we can see her forever in her youth in “Annie Hall” and remember why she touched us so deeply.

And not only as Annie Hall.

This gifted actor gave us an astonishing inventory of characters. How does the same woman transform herself from the Mafia wife Kay Adams-Corleone in “The Godfather” to the ditzy Annie Hall to Louise Bryant in that heart-wrenching train station reunion with Warren Beatty in “Reds”?

But it was Annie Hall, for many of us, with whom she’ll remain indelible — and important.

She was the beautiful chick who fell for the homely little nerd. Whoever heard of such a thing in a Hollywood movie — or in real life? And for some of us who’d grown up in a culture where the movie lovers were made from white bread and mayonnaise, the bonus in “Annie Hall” was that the guy was Jewish! And thereby died generations of ethnic stereotyping!

In fact, what a revelation this was to generations of all men who thought you had to look like Rock Hudson to get any girl who looked like … well, like Diane Keaton.

Inside each of us, male or female, no matter our outward looks, there lies the inner nerd, coming up short and hoping not to be discovered. Keaton’s characters saw the outer nerd — but reached for the beauty underneath and embraced the lucky guy. And not only in “Annie Hall.”

More broadly, across a lifetime, she was also an inspiration to women. In her personal life as well as her movies, she showed women that they could go it alone. They didn’t have to take the domestic housewife-and-mom route their mothers had taken.

Keaton famously never married but famously had love affairs with several of her co-stars. She acted, directed, wrote books. When she wanted children, she adopted them.

Up there on the movie screen, she could live a hundred different lives and put together outfits that transformed female style. She dressed for herself, not for somebody else’s fashion dictate.

But let’s go back to that business about beauty versus nerd. It wasn’t just her Annie Hall character who saw through the outer flaws to the inner beauty.

She and Woody Allen followed “Annie Hall” with “Manhattan.” She’s balancing two love affairs here, and keeps mentioning yet another love, her ex-husband, Jeremiah.

“This very brilliant, dominating man … an over-sexed kind of animal,” she calls him.

And then who shows up but Jeremiah, who turns out to be the short, bald, homely muppet Wallace Shawn, that rare male who could make Woody Allen look like Clark Gable.

As Shawn exits, Woody says, “Well, you certainly fooled me. Because that’s not what I expected.”

“Well, what did you expect?” Keaton replies.

“I don’t know, because you said he was a great ladies’ man, that he opened you up sexually.”

“Yeah, I did,” she says.

“And then this little homunculus …”

“He’s quite devastating,” Keaton insists.

So there.

Yes, it was Allen who wrote the words. But it was Keaton who brought these characters to life and made them believable. She was beautiful and bright and funny — and she was happiest with guys who looked like us at our most vulnerable.

Or, to put it as Helen Keller once did, “The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or touched. They must be felt with the heart.”

Diane Keaton showed us her own heart as her characters reached beyond mere surface beauty.

A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books, including “Journeys to the Heart of Baltimore” (Johns Hopkins University Press) and “Michael Olesker’s Baltimore: If You Live Here, You’re Home” (Johns Hopkins University).