Hollywood actress Diane Keaton has died in her home state of California. She was 79.
People Magazine confirmed her death on Saturday morning. The star’s family has asked for privacy.
The Godfather and Annie Hall star is survived by her two children, son Duke and daughter Dexter. She was born in 1946 in Los Angeles as Diane Hall, to a civil engineer father and stay-at-home mother, and was the oldest of four.
Keaton performed in high-school theatrical productions, graduating in 1964 before studying drama at college. She then dropped out and headed to New York to find her own way in the city’s theater scene.
In New York, she took her mother’s maiden name. This was in part to avoid being confused with another actress named “Diane Hall,” and partly a nod toward her mother’s creative sensibilities.
“Secretly in her heart of hearts she probably wanted to be an entertainer of some kind,” the actress said of her mother in a 2004 interview with People. “She sang. She played the piano. She was beautiful. She was my advocate.”
Keaton’s breakthrough on stage came in 1969 when she was cast in Woody Allen’s Broadway show Play It Again, Sam. Though she later revealed she’d been struggling with bulimia at the time, it was a performance that earned her a Tony nomination, and marked the beginning of a decades-long collaborative relationship with the controversial actor, writer and director.
Her role as Kay Adams, girlfriend and later wife of Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 hit The Godfather, marked her first major role on the big screen. She’d later confess she’d never read the book, and spent much of production at a loss as to what the first installment of the eventual three-part franchise was actually about.
“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,” as she put it in a 2022 sit-down with People. “I just was going around auditioning. I think that was amazing for me. And then I had to kind of read the book.”
Keaton’s first on-screen collaboration with Allen, a film adaptation of the same play that earned her a Tony nomination, was released the same year. She followed up with starring roles in Allen’s films Sleeper and Love and Death in 1973 and 1975 respectively.
Perhaps her most iconic role, as the titular character in Annie Hall, came in 1977—a performance that secured her the Oscar for Best Actress. Though many viewers speculated the film may have been based on her relationship with Allen, she later told The New York Times, “it’s not true, but there are elements of truth in it.”
Alongside her long-running collaboration with Allen, her other iconic performances included 1996’s The First Wives Club, 2003’s Something’s Gotta Give, and the 2016 TV miniseries The Young Pope.
She later courted controversy for defending Allen in the wake of backlash over allegations he sexually abused his stepdaughter Dylan Farrow, telling The Guardian “I love him” in 2014.
Though she never married, she was romantically linked with co-stars Allen, Pacino and Warren Beatty at various stages throughout her career. “‘I’m really glad I didn’t get married,” she told People in 2019. “I’m an oddball. I remember in high school, this guy came up to me and said, ‘One day you’re going to make a good wife.’ And I thought, ‘I don’t want to be a wife. No.’”
She adopted her children Dexter and Duke in 1996 and 2001, respectively. “Motherhood was not an urge I couldn’t resist, it was more like a thought I’d been thinking for a very long time,” she explained in a 2008 interview with Ladies’ Home Journal. “So I plunged in.”
