The role that saved Diane Keaton’s career: “Nobody wanted me in a movie”
Of all the actors who emerged during her era to become Hollywood mainstays, Diane Keaton seemed one of the least likely to end up flirting with the very real prospect of obscurity.
After all, her impact has been measured in generations, a testament to not only her talent but the legacy she created beyond the four corners of the silver screen. She’s inspired Emma Stone, Elizabeth Olsen, and Viola Davis, to name just three, and she’s never been absent from cinema for too long.
Since making her feature debut in the 1970 comedy Love and Other Strangers, Keaton’s longest-ever absence from a theatrical release has been a single calendar year. She’s become virtually ubiquitous, then, but there was a period where she felt her livelihood beginning to slip away.
It sounds like a ludicrous thing to say when talking about an Academy Award, Bafta, and two-time Golden Globe-winning icon who’s been involved in a range of classic films covering multiple genres, but Keaton confessed that things were looking pretty grim towards the end of the 1980s.
Even though she played the lead, Keaton was the only one of the three leads – alongside Sissy Spacek and Jessica Lange – who didn’t earn an Oscar nomination for their performance in 1986’s Crimes of the Heart, which is hardly disastrous. However, it was the latest oversight in a filmography that was filling up with more misfires and missteps than usual, to the point nobody wanted to hire her.
Alan Parker’s Shoot the Moon, George Roy Hill’s The Little Drummer Girl, and Gillian Armstrong’s Mrs Soffel had all flopped at the box office with Keaton as the female lead, and even Crimes of the Heart was a modest financial success despite winning so much acclaim for its performances.
The danger of becoming an industry afterthought was looming large, but one role came along at the perfect time and gave Keaton a second wind. Nancy Meyers’ Baby Boom, which starred her as a woman who unexpectedly becomes the guardian of a deceased relative’s baby, was her most profitable star turn in years.
Not only that, but it reminded audiences of her undoubted comic chops, landing Keaton her first Golden Globe nod in the ‘Musical or Comedy’ category since she’d claimed the prize at the first time of asking in Annie Hall a decade previously. It might sound hyperbolic, but she was adamant it was a game-changer.
“At the time, nobody wanted me in a movie,” she told the Sydney Morning Herald. “And this has happened several times in my life, and she changed my entire older years. That one movie made every bit the difference. That’s partial luck because she didn’t want Meryl Streep for that. She used Meryl Streep later, and that worked out really well, too, but at that point, she wanted me to do that.”
Giving Meyers all the credit, Keaton suggested that she “was not doing well in terms of my acting career” and the filmmaker’s decision to cast her in Baby Boom “changed everything.” One movie doesn’t make a career, but it can definitely help revitalise one.
