DIANE HALL KEATON, A GREAT CHAMELEONIC ACTRESS

Today, The Grandma continues relaxing at home. The weather is colder every day and she has decided to watch some films of one of her favourite actresses, Diane Keaton, the great American artist who was born on a day like today in 1946.

Diane Hall Keaton (born January 5, 1946) is an American actress and filmmaker.

Known for her idiosyncratic personality and dressing style, Keaton has received an Academy Award, a BAFTA Award, two Golden Globe Awards, and the AFI Life Achievement Award.

Keaton began her career on stage and made her screen debut as an extra in Lovers and Other Strangers (1970). She rose to prominence with her first major film role as Kay Adams-Corleone in The Godfather (1972), a role she reprised in its sequels The Godfather Part II (1974) and The Godfather Part III (1990). But the films that most shaped her career were those with director and co-star Woody Allen, beginning with Play It Again, Sam (1972). Her next two films with Allen, Sleeper (1973) and Love and Death (1975), established her as a comic actor. Her fourth, the romantic comedy Annie Hall (1977), won her the Academy Award for Best Actress.

To avoid being typecast as her Annie Hall persona, Keaton became an accomplished dramatic performer, starring in Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977) and Interiors (1978), and received three more Academy Award nominations for playing feminist activist Louise Bryant in Reds (1981), a woman with leukemia in Marvin's Room (1996), and a dramatist in Something's Gotta Give (2003).

Keaton's other popular films include Manhattan (1979), Baby Boom (1987), Father of the Bride Part I (1991) and Part II (1995), Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993), The First Wives Club (1996), The Family Stone (2005), Morning Glory (2010), Finding Dory (2016) and Book Club (2018).

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Diane Keaton was born Diane Hall in Los Angeles, California. Her mother, Dorothy Deanne (née Keaton; 1921–2008), was a homemaker and amateur photographer; her father, John Newton Ignatius Jack Hall (1922–1990), was a real estate broker and civil engineer. Keaton was raised a Free Methodist by her mother.

Her mother won the Mrs. Los Angeles pageant for homemakers; Keaton has said that the theatricality of the event inspired her first impulse to be an actress, and led to her wanting to work on stage. She has also credited Katharine Hepburn, whom she admires for playing strong and independent women, as one of her inspirations.

Keaton is a 1964 graduate of Santa Ana High School in Santa Ana, California. During her time there, she participated in singing and acting clubs at school, and starred as Blanche DuBois in a school production of A Streetcar Named Desire. 

After graduation, she attended Santa Ana College, and later Orange Coast College as an acting student, but dropped out after a year to pursue an entertainment career in Manhattan. Upon joining the Actors' Equity Association, she changed her surname to Keaton, her mother's maiden name, as there was already an actress registered under the name of Diane Hall.

For a brief time she also moonlighted at nightclubs with a singing act. She revisited her nightclub act in Annie Hall (1977), And So It Goes (2014), and a cameo in Radio Days (1987).

Keaton began studying acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York City. She initially studied acting under the Meisner technique, an ensemble acting technique first evolved in the 1930s by Sanford Meisner, a New York stage actor/acting coach/director who had been a member of The Group Theater (1931–1940).

Keaton said she produced her 1987 documentary Heaven because I was always pretty religious as a kid... I was primarily interested in religion because I wanted to go to heaven. When she grew up, she became agnostic.

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As an actress, I'm drawn to emotion and expressing
the human condition in all its forms,
and I'm fortunate to have thoughts
and feelings at my fingertips.

Diane Keaton