Diane Keaton’s 13 Best Performances, from ‘The Godfather’ and ‘Reds’ to ‘The First Wives Club’ and ‘Something’s Gotta Give’

“The Godfather” (1972)

We think of Diane Keaton as a comedienne best-known for her collaborations with Woody Allen, but she came up as a working actress building respect with casting agents and directors. Early on, Francis Ford Coppola cast her in “The Godfather” as Kay Adams-Corleone, the tightly wound, WASPy wife of Michael Corleone (Al Pacino), who falls for the handsome young soldier just home from the war and then watches him slowly transform into the ruthless head of the Corleone crime family. She explodes when she reveals the ultimate betrayal. “It was an abortion. An abortion, Michael!”

She never fits in, and looks awkward and miserable much of the time. She keeps her head and moral compass on straight while others are losing theirs. Keaton often mentioned that she felt miscast. She popped up in a 2023 Instagram Stories “Ask me anything” session with Coppola and asked him, “Why on Earth did you choose me for The Godfather?!!” The director wrote back: “I chose you, because although you were to play the more straight/vanilla wife, there was something more about you, deeper, funnier, and very interesting. (I was right).” —AT

“Sleeper” (1973)

Though it was officially their second collaboration, “Sleeper” was the first film Woody Allen would direct Keaton in, and it instantly established her as his best on screen comic foil. Allen is always himself in his films, but here Keaton begins the movie as a beautiful yuppie and rapidly becomes hysterical and raw. She might be more remembered for her effervescent charm in more serious romances, but for her to come out of the gate as perfectly gifted with screwball in Allen’s futuristic sci-fi farce shows the breadth of her talent. To see her ride Allen on a lake in his ridiculous Hydrovac inflatable suit is proof that she would go literally anywhere Allen asked her to go on screen. —BW

“Annie Hall” (1977)

When I was a twenty-something in the United Artists publicity bullpen, we released “Annie Hall.” It was a publicity whirlwind as Diane Keaton caught fire. She had worked with her partner Woody Allen before in “Play It Again Sam,” “Sleeper,” and “Love and Death,” but her persona in this New York romantic comedy was tailormade for her (while her family name was Hall, in truth, she was a California girl). She was a unique, goofy (“la di da”), lovable woman who played tennis, went to therapy, adored foreign films, was afraid of a spider “the size of a buick” and live lobsters. She also sang like a dream. 

Keaton’s unique fashion exploded in the culture. Everyone wanted to dress like her, including me. I wore the works: oversize men’s vests, shirts, pants, ties, jackets, and hats. She changed me. I identified with her. Inevitably, she won the Best Actress Oscar and hit the cover of Time. She was now a movie star. —AT

“Looking for Mr. Goodbar” (1977)

There have rarely been two so wildly different performances from a single actor in the same year than Diane Keaton with “Annie Hall” and “Looking for Mr. Goodbar” in 1977. In Richard Brooks’ gritty and unbearably tragic morality tale, Keaton plays Theresa Dunn, a sexually liberated schoolteacher of deaf children in a city that resembles New York.

But her sexual walkabout lands her in the beds and psychological crosshairs of men who are mostly disappointing or worse. Those include Richard Gere as her spastic on-and-off boyfriend and Tom Berenger as her ultimately fatal last lay in the movie’s controversial and traumatic, as much then for shocked audiences as now, finale, with its “you fuck, you die” moralistic messaging. Keaton’s performance has cracks in it, which make for much of the charm.

There’s a feeling of an actress, just starting out, in over her head with excruciating, difficult material (Tuesday Weld as Theresa’s harpy sister got the film’s only acting Oscar nomination) but her commitment and fearlessness make for a performance that gets better as the film goes along and now serves as a fascinating time capsule for cautionary ‘70s movies that took to tsk-tsking sexual freedom. —RL

“Manhattan” (1979)

Woody Allen’s Gershwin-scored, Panavision-ratioed, black-and-white song for New York “Manhattan” remains one of his most visually striking achievements, thanks to DP Gordon Willis, even as later revelations from star Mariel Hemingway, who plays Allen’s literal teenage girlfriend in the movie, trouble the 1979 movie’s legacy. Regardless, Diane Keaton gives a brilliantly funny (to use the own words of her character Mary Wilkie) performance as a self-inflated, self-defeating intellectual with wild hair that conceals a brain of neuroses and emotional spasming that men either want to get inside and try and solve, or not come anywhere near.

She plays the mistress of Allen’s character Isaac’s best friend (Michael Murphy) who ends up falling for Isaac. Her rants about contemporary art (“the steel cube had a marvelous negative capability; the rest of the stuff downstairs was bullshit”) and Bergman (“I loved it when I was at Radcliffe but you absolutely outgrow it”) make for some of the most spikily hilarious, quotable Keaton moments in a career boundless with them. But it’s the melancholy core at Mary’s center that Keaton locates and extracts to drive the audience to empathy even when this woman frustratingly not only can’t get out of her own way but throws herself in front of herself as if she were hurling into traffic. —RL

“Reds” (1981)

In another departure from her comedy persona, Keaton joined her then-lover Warren Beatty in his ambitious historic spectacle, “Reds,” his attempt to make a movie on the scale of “Dr. Zhivago.” Beatty co-wrote, directed, and played the fiery Bohemian Communist agitator John Reed who, with his feminist journalist wife Louise Bryant (Keaton), passionately promoted the Russian Revolution. The wife of a Portland dentist, Bryant ran away with Reed, tried to hold her intellectual ground, and traveled the world with him, through icy winter storms and hellish prisons. She was steadfast and loyal and tough. Reed and Bryant’s romance anchors this three-hour-19-minute period epic.

Keaton considered Bryant a difficult, dislikable person, but “I loved her,” she told one interviewer. And Bryant loves Reed dearly through long separations and death threats as well as her own tangled affair with Eugene O’Neill (Jack Nicholson). When the couple are finally reunited in a Russian train station, it breaks your heart. —AT

“Shoot the Moon” (1982)

Two years after winning his second Academy Award for writing “Melvin and Howard,” Bo Goldman topped himself with the screenplay for this searing 1982 drama about the ravages of divorce on a suburban American family. Albert Finney and Diane Keaton give two of the best performances of their careers playing characters filled with heartbreak, rage, longing, and (occasionally) humor as their marriage disintegrates.

Keaton plays the betrayed spouse with highly precise gestures and line readings that prove the old adage about the specific becoming universal — her performance is as singular as it is deeply relatable in every minute she appears onscreen. Though her fireworks with Finney got a lot of the film’s critical attention, Keaton’s most powerful moment is a solitary one; the scene in which she sings to herself alone in the bathtub after her whole life has fallen apart is one of the most memorable of her career. —JH

“Baby Boom” (1987)

In Charles Shyer’s delightful “Baby Boom,” Keaton delivers the kind of genre-defining performance that helped reshape Hollywood’s understanding of womanhood on screen — and she made it look easy. As J.C. Wiatt, the high-powered Manhattan management consultant blindsided by sudden  motherhood, Keaton doesn’t just lean into the film’s screwball energy, she grounds it. There’s a magnetic, barely-controlled chaos to her comedic timing, as she grapples with her new life and comes to love it, and it’s this layered emotional agility that keeps “Baby Boom” from tipping into fluff.

Underneath the big shoulder pads and even bigger 1980s dilemmas (career or family? city or country? capitalism or granola?), Keaton constructs a woman in transition. Her performance has the zip of classic Hepburn and the internalized tension of early Streep, but it’s distinctly, unmistakably Keaton: wry, warm, slightly unhinged, and full of bristling intelligence.

Directed by Shyer and co-written by Nancy Meyers, “Baby Boom” sets Keaton up as both comic heroine and feminist cipher. She doesn’t just react to the absurdities of her new life — she evolves with them, and Keaton sells every beat of that transformation. Anyone who has ever spent a winter in Vermont (me, me, me) can relate to her wacked-out response to snowdrifts that only ever seem to obscure still more necessary house repairs, but it’s impossible not to want to see her win. And win she does (thanks, gourmet baby food!). This is one of the roles that made me fall in love with her, and it continues to show her full complexity, nearly four decades on. —KE

“Manhattan Murder Mystery” (1993)

Diane Keaton and Woody Allen’s eighth and final collaboration is their most purely pleasurable. “Annie Hall” is more iconic and “Manhattan” more complex, but in terms of laughs per minute this is the one to beat, with Keaton at her most delightfully eccentric as an amateur sleuth who drags her husband (Allen) kicking and screaming into a quest to solve the murder of a neighbor.

Keaton and Allen pick right up where they left off (unsurprising, given that the murder mystery story started as part of an early draft of “Annie Hall”), but Keaton isn’t just hilarious with Allen, she’s hilarious with everybody — her scenes with Alan Alda as a family friend who has eyes for her are pure comedy heaven.

It’s no secret that Keaton was one of the great comediennes of her era, but her work here is nevertheless revelatory in Keaton’s ingenuous ways of fully realizing the potential of each line and gag. Allen and Marshall Brickman’s screenplay is packed with clever comic situations, and Keaton capitalizes on and improves each and every one of them, delivering the script’s fast badinage like a modern day Rosalind Russell. —JH

“The First Wives Club” (1996)

Ask the typical cinephile for a good example of a woman being gaslit on film and they’ll probably point you to “Rosemary’s Baby.” The seriocomic torture endured by Keaton’s character in “The First Wives Club” isn’t as literally horrific — no one gets impregnated by the devil here. But watching director Hugh Wilson’s dark comedy, there’s a wave of nausea that hits when you realize the cruelty that’s befallen Annie MacDuggan (formerly Annie MacDuggan-Paradis) that feels like its own kind of demonic morning sickness.

Getting audiences to root for revenge can be tough, particularly when the people getting “even” are women. But thanks to starring trio Keaton, Goldie Hawn, and Bette Middler, “The First Wives Club” was a major hit. It’s one of several films throughout the legendary late actress’ career that saw Keaton and friends turning the tables on men who wronged them, and no question the best of the bunch. As the slighted ex-wife of a man (Stephen Collins, yikes) — who runs away with their mutual therapist (!!) — Keaton grounds the marital heist film in a quietly passionate and resolutely heartbreaking performance that’s essential to the film’s enduring fans.

In a poetic moment of life imitating art, “The First Wives Club” launched a significant resurgence for Keaton in Hollywood, too. Not only did the film reassert the idea that the then-50-year-old actress could support a blockbuster comedy at the box office, but it also solidified her reputation as a feminist force and aligned her with fearless women in entertainment for years to come. —AF

“Something’s Gotta Give” (2003)

Much like a successful female playwright of a certain age, the accomplishments of Diane Keaton in “Something’s Gotta Give” are fascinating and undeniable. Without the 2003 Nancy Meyers hit, it’s hard to imagine a lot of rom-coms — and, eventually, the “older people still get to be messy and fun” conceit that has powered everything from Keaton’s own “Book Club” series to “80 for Brady” — getting made at all. Jack Nicholson is a delight as Harry, a blowhard bachelor who, forced to convalesce in Keaton’s gracious Hampton’s beach house post heart attack, finally gets the chance to change his life for the better by falling in love with a woman he can actually talk to (and/or AIM chat with).

But it’s Keaton’s Erica who is the heart (and spine and brain) of the film. She is so devastatingly clever, so graceful in how she deploys her wit and experience as a shield against the world; and yet Keaton also shows us that those things about Erica are no defense for the emotions she’s now finally getting to feel, often just through the shine in her eyes. Meyer’s script gives Nicholson and Keaton the chance to really spar as equals, and Keaton makes watching that match, whether it is barbs over dinner or a line of dancing dudes in hospital gowns, a pleasure.

However silly or improbable the shenanigans to get there, the best rom-coms always make the happy endings feel earned, and that is what Keaton does in “Something’s Gotta Give” by showing us just how much it takes for Erica to give even an inch. Both her and Nicholson’s performances are so good that they will, as saying goes, always have Paris. —SS

“The Family Stone” (2005)

Although it may prove to be a bit of a difficult watch, based on present context, this modern holiday classic written and directed by Thomas Bezucha is, in part, a heartfelt celebration of Keaton’s life — which she lived to the fullest — that exhibits why she was the type of actress that could make any ensemble piece sing. By the time of its release, post her career resurgence via “Something’s Gotta Give,” Keaton was too distinctive a figure for writers to not build any character she played in her image. That being said, as the matriarch of a free-spirited New England family, mothering children played by Dermot Mulroney, Luke Wilson, Elizabeth Reaser, Tyrone Giordano, and Rachel McAdams, Keaton is so inviting and at ease that even the audience feels they have an invite to the family’s Christmas celebration, just so long as they do not harp on what anyone thinks of them or their strata. —MJ

“Morning Glory” (2010)

Caustic, unlikable, and indisputably right, the pissed-off news anchor Keaton played in “Morning Glory” should be remembered among her most hilarious performances, hidden gem though it may be. She’s opposite a screamingly sexist Harrison Ford in this 2010 rom com, directed by Roger Michell and written by “The Devil Wears Prada” genius Aline Brosh McKenna. It also stars Rachel McAdams (with some great bangs!) as an early-career TV producer trying to save a failing morning show.

Calling her colleague “a fatuous pretentious idiot” on air could’ve been the end for DayBreak co-anchor Colleen Peck (Keaton), but the whip-smart journalist sparring with Mike Pomeroy (Ford) — they pair clash over everything from the gender pay-gap and performative pap-smears to Easter chicks and the word “fluffy” — proves entertaining enough to cause a spike in ratings.

Plus, Diane kisses a frog in this one. That’s not a metaphor. She really goes full-on mouth-to-amphibian for “Morning Glory,” and if that doesn’t at least perk your interest in this movie, you don’t deserve the news business. —AF