An ethereally self-aware comedy genius: the loss of Diane Keaton is devastating

T he millpond calm of her face, its beauty, its gentleness, its openness and unworldliness became even more heart stopping when she laughed or cried – and generations of moviegoers felt their own crush on Diane Keaton escalate into something more. She was more than America’s sweetheart: Keaton was the sophisticated, sweet-natured, unaffectedly sensual woman with whom America was unrequitedly in love. Diane Keaton was out of America’s league. Diane Keaton: a life in pictures Read more

In the golden age of the American New Wave in the 1970s, she was at the centre of that era’s great comedy and tragedy: as Kay, the innocent wife of Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone in Coppola’s The Godfather (1972), she was the aghast, complicit witness to mob toxicity and murder, paralysed with disillus