Woody Allen fell in love with Diane Keaton as quickly as he set eyes on her, however took every week to pluck up the braveness to talk to the lady whose stellar profession he would assist to turbo cost.
He has now paid a heartfelt tribute to his favourite actress and former associate, whose dying was introduced on the weekend.
“I first laid eyes on her lanky beauty at an audition and thought, If Huckleberry Finn was a gorgeous young woman, he’d be Keaton,” 89-year-old Allen wrote in an extended tribute in The Free Press to Keaton, whose dying was introduced Saturday. She was 79.
“For the first week of rehearsal we never spoke a word to one another,” he mentioned of his time appearing alongside her within the 1972 movie “Play It Again, Sam.”
“She was shy, I was shy, and with two shy people things can get pretty dull. Finally, by chance we took a break at the same moment and wound up sharing a fast bite… The upshot is that she was so charming, so beautiful, so magical, that I questioned my sanity. I thought: Could I be in love so quickly?”
Allen, the acclaimed director-screenwriter-actor who by no means shook allegations that he molested his adopted daughter in 1992, described later shifting in with Keaton and forming a artistic bond with the beloved actress.
“She sat through ‘Take the Money and Run’ and said the movie was very funny and very original. Her words. Its success proved her correct and I never doubted her judgment again,” she mentioned.
“I never read a single review of my work and cared only what Keaton had to say about it. If she liked it, I counted the film as an artistic success,” mentioned Allen, who labored alongside Keaton in a number of movies, together with “Annie Hall,” “Manhattan,” and “Manhattan Murder Mystery.”
Keaton stood by Allen when a lot of Hollywood shunned the neurotic funnyman on the peak of the MeToo reckoning in January 2018, tweeting “Woody Allen is my friend and I continue to believe him.”
At that point, the director was once more going through accusations of sexual assault, made in 1992 by his adoptive daughter Dylan Farrow. Charges in opposition to him had been dropped after two separate investigations.
In his tribute, Allen describes Keaton’s tough relationship with meals.
“She’d put away a sirloin, hash browns, marble cheesecake, and coffee. Then we’d get home, and moments later she’d be toasting waffles or packing a huge taco with pork,” he wrote.
“This slim actress ate like Paul Bunyan. Only years later when she wrote a memoir did she describe her eating disorder.”
Allen concluded his tribute by saying that “a few days ago the world was a place that included Diane Keaton.”
“Now it’s a world that does not. Hence, it’s a drearier world.”
© 2025 AFP