Annie Hall's famous menswear look was partly Diane Keaton's own wardrobe
The neckties, waistcoats, baggy trousers and fedoras of Annie Hall set off a late-1970s fashion wave, with women adopting pantsuits and men's clothing. Diane Keaton had dressed that way for years, and some of the outfits were hers. Even the name was borrowed: Annie was her nickname, Hall her birth surname.
Keaton was born Diane Hall in Los Angeles on January 5, 1946, the eldest of four children of a homemaker and a civil engineer. Her mother won a Mrs. Los Angeles contest for homemakers, and the theatre of that event first made the girl want to perform. After a year of college acting classes she left for Manhattan, and on joining Actors' Equity she took her mother's maiden name, because a Diane Hall was already registered. She trained at the Neighborhood Playhouse in the Meisner technique, an approach built around playing off fellow actors.
Her Broadway start came in 1968 as an understudy in Hair, where she was known for declining to strip at the end of the first act, even though nude performers earned a 50-dollar bonus. Next she tried out for Woody Allen's Play It Again, Sam and was nearly turned down for height: at 5 ft 8 in she stood 2 inches above Allen. She won the part and a Tony nomination.
Francis Ford Coppola noticed her in her screen debut and cast her as Kay Adams, Michael Corleone's girlfriend and later wife, in The Godfather in 1972, partly for her reputation for eccentricity. She called the role, like the experience of filming it, being the woman in a world of men. Opinions split: Time found her nearly invisible, while Empire saw her as the quiet lynchpin of male-dominated films.
Allen called her his muse, and she appeared in eight of his films. Annie Hall brought her the Best Actress Oscar in 1977 and was widely read as a portrait of their relationship; Allen described her acting as a nervous breakdown in slow motion. Time put her on its cover that September, calling her the funniest woman then working in film. Later Oscar nominations followed for Reds, Marvin's Room and Something's Gotta Give. She received the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2017 and died on October 11, 2025.
Source: Diane Keaton
