Diane Keaton, film icon and Woody Allen's muse, has died at 79.

American actress Diane Keaton has died at the age of 79 .

One of the greatest actresses of recent decades, a protagonist of 50 years of American cinema , she was Woody Allen's muse. After prominent roles in masterpieces such as "The Godfather" and "The Godfather II" (first as Michael Corleone's girlfriend, then his wife), she found her breakthrough working with Woody Allen .

The fourth film in which Keaton and the American director collaborated, Annie Hall, earned her a 1978 Oscar for Best Actress and a Golden Globe . Their professional relationship later developed into a romantic relationship ("The greatest love of my life," Allen called it), which ended when Keaton began dating Warren Beatty.

Diane Keaton later had a relationship with Al Pacino: she never married, but adopted two children: Dexter and Duke. "Motherhood was an impulse I couldn't resist; it was a thought I'd nurtured for a long time," she said in a 2008 interview. Her children, aged 29 and 25, have requested privacy: no further details on the cause of death are available.

Also a producer, director, photographer, and interior designer, Keaton has been nominated for an Oscar four times. The daughter of an engineer and real estate agent of Irish origin and an amateur photographer with a passion for art (Dorothy Keaton), Diane Hall – her real name – was born in Los Angeles and fell in love with show business thanks to her mother . A passion that pushed her to attend acting and singing schools and to move to New York to attend the Actors' Equity Association. A change accompanied by the decision to take her mother's surname to make her way. Her baptism of fire on the stage was with "A Streetcar Named Desire", but her first personal success came with "Hair": her performance was so impressive that it intrigued Allen, who, after an audition, selected her for his stage play "Play It Again, Sam". She made her film debut in a minor role in Cy Howard's "Lovers and Other Strangers" . Then Francis Ford Coppola, Woody Allen and all the rest.

In 2020, Keaton revealed in a book the plight of her mentally ill brother, abandoned and neglected throughout the years the actress pursued success in the film industry . Diane was the eldest daughter, Randy, a lifelong victim of paranoia and violent fantasies, the youngest and only son of Jack and Dorothy Hall's four children. For Keaton, the memoir "Brother and Sister" was a form of atonement but also her contribution to ensuring that serious mental illnesses like Randy's are addressed without prejudice and with an open attitude.

(Unioneonline)