One month shy of her 60th birthday, Diane Keaton still retains some of the charming innocence that first captivated cinema audiences. Here she speaks to Darryl Smith about a career spent re-inventing herself. 

Woody allen, Diane’s long-time boyfriend and director, once explained, “She believes in God, but she also believes that the radio works because there are tiny people inside it.”

Diane Keaton’s a comedy actress, a serious actress, a director, an adoptive mother and involves herself in local politics.

She’s busier than ever and her latest movie, The Family Stone, has just been released.

Age has clearly not wearied her.

“It’s kind of true, you do disappear off the planet if you are a middle-aged woman in the movie industry,” says Diane philosophically. “But that has some advantages as well.

“Too much of my life had been spent waiting to be seen, hoping to be seen, hoping to be picked. Once you realise that you aren’t looked at that way any more, other things start to happen and you have to depend on other things to get by.

“I was very self-involved when I was younger, too self-involved. The fact that your life expands as you get older and you stop looking in and you start looking out makes life more exciting, more adventurous. 

“That is what separates youth from being older, or gives you the potential of having a good old age. I feel more freedom to be myself. You can be older, fall in love and experience things with another human being that you never thought you could do, feel, love or enjoy. So that part of getting older is freeing.” 

Diane’s lack of inhibitions has led to her regularly showing moviegoers all she’s got these days. In the romantic comedy Something’s Gotta Give she shared a hilarious nude scene with Jack Nicholson, and she disrobes again — although much more poignantly — for this month’s release, The Family Stone.

A touching comedy with Sarah Jessica Parker in the lead role as a socially awkward businesswoman visiting her boyfriend’s close-knit clan of touchy-feely, New England snobs for the Christmas holidays, sees Diane playing the matriarch of the Stone family.

The character is also a breast cancer survivor and Diane posed topless in one scene with a fake surgical breast removal on show — as a tribute to real-life cancer fighters. 

Diane fought for the bedroom scene’s inclusion, saying she hates the way such delicate issues have been approached in the past. 

“I’ve seen so many cancer movies where there’s always the horror of the reveal. You see the back of the woman and it’s always played that way. 

“This scene was so sweet because, first of all, it was set up (in the film) that I have this illness in kind of a mysterious way so little was made of it. 

“It’s dealt with in a manner that gives so much respect to people who go through this (breast cancer) in their own lives.” 

Born Diane Hall in January, 1946 and growing up in Santa Ana, California, Diane always had aspirations to become an actress and enrolled with Actors’ Equity at the earliest opportunity. Upon discovering that there was already a ‘Diane Hall’ registered she changed her last name to Keaton, her mother’s maiden name.

While many acting hopefuls turn up in Hollywood hoping to make it big, Diane went the other way, leaving California as a 19-year-old to enrol for an acting scholarship in New York City. From there it’s a short hop to Broadway and her first big break in the musical Hair.

Initially rejected at the audition, the producers changed their mind at the last minute and Diane stayed on as understudy to the lead. When the leading lady left the show Diane replaced her, quickly making a name for herself by being the only cast member to abstain from the striptease finale. 

Nine months after her appearance in Hair, Diane met Woody Allen and was cast for his first Broadway play, Play It Again, Sam. The two soon moved their partnership from a professional to a romantic one, and her oscar-winning performance in Annie Hall is a loose parody of their relationship (as well as using her real surname in the title, Diane’s nickname is Annie).

But Diane wasn’t just a muse for Woody Allen and his movies during the 1970s. While most people were questioning whether she could play anything other than the bumbling, awkward, romantic comedy role that Woody had shaped for her, Francis Ford Coppola cast her in his epic mobster drama, The Godfather, as the much maligned Kay, wife of Michael Corleone (played by Al Pacino).

As the decade progressed she made a second Godfather movie, widely regarded as the greatest sequel of all-time, split with Woody and became involved with Warren Beatty. Once again she mixed her personal and professional life, acting alongside Warren in Reds (which he also directed). Diane received an Academy Award nomination for her performance.

That marked a change in her career, away from comedy and into more challenging, dramatic (and fewer) roles of the 1980s until she returned to her comedy roots in 1991 as Steve Martin’s better half in Father Of The Bride.

At the time of making the well-received First Wives’ Club, she took on a challenging role of a different kind, becoming the adoptive mother of daughter Dexter. Dexter now has a brother, Duke, whom Diane adopted in 2001.

Diane has never married, though is consistently linked with hunky actors. 

“If you’re right about where I am now, the fact that you fall in love is so sweet. It couldn’t be more heavenly because you know that it can’t last, although when you’re a kid you live under the delusion that it will last forever.

“I find the same thing sexy in a man now as I always have — humour. I love it when they are funny. 

“I watched Annie Hall again recently. I had forgotten how many filmmaking concepts Woody pioneered with that film. His imagination is just astonishing. 

“It was the easiest part for me to play, maybe with the exception of the singing. That was the hardest part of the movie. Because Woody just refuses to make a big deal out of anything, he just wants you to sing, three takes and that’s it — “Let’s move on”. I felt like I needed more time. 

“I wanted it to be good because I’d had a lifelong ambition to be a singer. I had a nightclub act at Reno Sweeny’s, this place in New York. But my fantasy didn’t compute with what being a nightclub singer was actually like.”

It’s just a thought, but the life of Diane Keaton would make a mighty good movie!