At the end of Baby Boom, the 1987 film starring Diane Keaton as a career woman who suddenly becomes a mother after “inheriting” a baby, she stands before a board room full of the very men who decided that motherhood was distracting her from her high-flying corporate career. After quitting and building a new, successful company by herself, these men want her back. She rejects their offer by declaring: “I think I’m doing pretty good on my own.” Baby Boom would be Keaton’s first collaboration with filmmaker Nancy Meyers, who would—starting a few decades later with Something’s Gotta Give—help install the actress as a romantic comedy mainstay. Keaton was so associated with the genre that when she died on Oct. 11 at the age of 79, appreciations and obituaries described her as a kind of rom-com icon. It’s an ironic title considering Keaton seemed to spend her life and career saying, over and over again, I’m good on my own.
In one of her earliest roles, in The Godfather, for which director Francis Ford Coppola hired her because she was already known around town for her eccentricity, Keaton sits rapt with her blonde curls among all those dark-haired Italian Americans, her not-quite-guileless face flattening as Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) tells her about his mafia family. She doesn’t fit in that world—neither physically nor temperamentally—and he abandons her when he rises to the top. She’s sad about it, she tries to get in touch over and over, but eventually she’s fine, really. When Michael does come back to her, he’s the one doing the chasing. In the last scene of the film, Michael takes a meeting as the head of the family and the door closes on Kay, alone, her face holding up the final frame—Coppola knew that Keaton alone could command a room. Years later, she intimated Pacino, with whom she had a relationship off screen, was the one that got away. She thought he would marry her, but wouldn’t go so far as asking him herself. Which is probably for the best, as Keaton wasn’t really the marrying kind. She knew that from the start. “I remember in high school,” she told People magazine, “this guy came up to me and said, ‘One day you’re going to make a good wife.’ And I thought, ‘I don’t want to be a wife. No.'”
