Elegant, funny and bohemian

Keaton's ethereal charm defined her comic genius.

- Peter Bradshaw

The 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 filmgoers felt their own crush on Diane Keaton escalate into something more.

She was not just 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.

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 disillusion and fear as she was shut out of her husband's dealings in his private sanctum - and then, in the next film, like a modern-day Medea, reveals to the icily infuriated Michael the awful truth about her miscarriage.

But in that decade it was as a comic performer of ethereally self-aware genius that she became more known, thanks to her many films playing opposite Woody Allen: in Sleeper; Play It Again, Sam; Love and Death; Manhattan and, most gloriously of all, in Annie Hall (her Oscar-winner). In admiring Keaton’s wonderful performance in that romcom masterpiece we can appreciate that the film is the jewel of the American New Wave - in fact, with its freewheeling city life and its literary gestures and in-jokes, it is closer to the French New Wave.