Oscar-winning actress Diane Keaton has died at the age of 79, People magazine has confirmed. Further details are not available at this time, and her loved ones have asked for privacy, according to a family spokesperson. The actress began her career in the 1960s in the original Broadway production of the musical Hair. The next year, she was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play for her performance in Woody Allen's comic play Play It Again, Sam.
Diane went on to frequently collaborate with the director, including Sleeper (1973) and Love and Death (1975) while 1977's Annie Hall (1977) saw her win the Academy Award for Best Actress. It was speculated that the film was based on their real life, but she told The New York Times in 1977: "It's not true, but there are elements of truth in it."
Diane's first major film role was as Kay Adams-Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (1972), and she went on to reprise it in the sequels Part II (1974) and Part III (1990). "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 told People in 2022 of not reading the book beforehand. "I just was going around auditioning. I think that was amazing for me." In recent years she appeared alongside Jane Fonda, Candice Bergen and Mary Steenburgen in Book Club, and the 2023 sequel.
Diane dated Woody throughout the 1970s, and they remained close friends throughout the decades. During filming of The Godfather she began dating Al Pacino, although heir on-again, off-again relationship ended after the filming of The Godfather Part III. "Al was simply the most entertaining man ... To me, that's, that is the most beautiful face. I think Warren [Beatty] was gorgeous, very pretty, but Al's face is like whoa. Killer, killer face," she once said of his beauty.
She dated Warren from 1979 until the mid-1980s, and they also remained friends. Diane never married, but talking about being single, she explained to People in 2019: "Today I was thinking, I'm the only one in my generation of actresses who has been a single woman all her life. I'm really glad I didn't get married. 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.'"
Diane had already turned 50 when, in 1996, she adopted her daughter Dexter, 29. Five years later, the family of two expanded to three when the actress decided to adopt another youngster, son Duke, now 25. "Having children is so much more important than everything else I have done," she affirmed. "When you're a parent the entire landscape of your life is entirely obliterated by them."
"I didn't think that I was ever going to be prepared to be a mother," she later told Ladies Home Journal in 2008. "Motherhood was not an urge I couldn't resist, it was more like a thought I'd been thinking for a very long time. So I plunged in."
Both of her children have remained out of the spotlight, which she has called "very healthy" although they did support their mother in 2022 at her Hand & Footprint Ceremony at Hollywood's TCL Chinese Theatre in Hollywood.
Her achievements were not just on the big screen, however, as Diane published three books of photographs and won the respect of her peers for her work as a director and producer, taking charge behind the camera on Unstrung Heroes and Hanging Up. She also produced Gus Van Sant's Elephant, which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes.
"Everyone loves Diane Keaton," says her Something's Gotta Give co-star Jack Nicholson. "She's a true original."
As well as the Oscar and three further nominations over the years, Diane won various other awards, including two Golden Globe awards and a BAFTA, as well as receiving four SAG nominations and two Emmy nominations.
In 2017, she was honored by the American Film Institute and given a Lifetime Achievement Award, which was presented to her by Woody Allen, and saw a host of A-listers pay tribute, including Steve Martin, Martin Short, Meryl Streep, Reese Witherspoon, Emma Stone, Rachel McAdams, Morgan Freeman, and Al.