Diane Keaton, the woman who served as our partial eyes and ears into the Corleone family in The Godfather, and the Oscar winner for Best Actress in 1977 for her role in the comedy Annie Hall, has passed away at the age of 79.
People confirmed today that the actress passed away in California, leaving behind an incredible career marked by iconic roles, many of which have become comedy classics. Besides her award-winning turn in Annie Hall, Keaton also starred opposite Steve Martin and Martin Short in the Father of the Bride films, as well as sharing the screen with Goldie Hawn and Bette Midler in The First Wives Club, to name a few.
Following the announcement, Midler took to Instagram saying, “The brilliant, beautiful, extraordinary Diane Keaton has died. I cannot tell you how unbearably sad this makes me. 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!”
Her most notable breakout role, however, was as Kay Adams, the girlfriend and eventual wife of Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) in The Godfather, who found herself forever on the outskirts of the family she married into. For Keaton, the role was a significant risk, as she did not know what the film was about before signing on, but she expressed her immense gratitude for joining one of the greatest movies ever made.
“I think the kindest thing that someone’s ever done for me … is that I got cast to be in The Godfather and I didn’t even read it. I didn’t know a single thing,” she confessed to People. “I just was going around auditioning. I think that was amazing for me. And then I had to kind of read the book.”
Nevertheless, years later, Keaton couldn’t help but ask her former director, Francis Ford Coppola, why he had hired her (via Vanity Fair). “I chose you, because although you were to play the more straight/vanilla wife,” he said. “There was something more about you, deeper, funnier, and very interesting. (I was right).”
