It's a little surreal. Talking to Diane Keaton, as will the audience at her upcoming appearance for Brilliant Lecture Series on February 6, is a lot like walking onto the set of Annie Hall. It's almost as though one can see her leaning against the door at that New York athletic club, wearing her loose necktie and floppy hat, awkwardly fumbling with that tennis racket as she offers Woody Allen a lift in her garbage-filled Volkswagen Beetle.
But that is probably a lot safer than walking onto the set of Keaton's other signature screen role, in the equally sacred Godfather trilogy, which cable television still delights in presenting in perpetual, endless-loop marathons. In it, Keaton, of course, played Kay, Michael Corleone's wife, for a reported $35,000 in The Godfather's first installment. At the time, it was an offer she...well, you know the rest.
"I haven't seen that thing in, like, 25 years," Annie--oops--Diane la-di-da's. "How's it holding up?"
Oh, it's fair to say it's holding up reasonably well.
"Poor Kay," she continues. "That was a bad choice for her. She was in way over her head. She did it for love, but is that the kind of love you want in your life? I don't think so."
The star of more than 50 movies (eight of them with her mentor and ex-boyfriend, Woody Allen), this year Keaton adds two more to her lengthy filmography: And So It Goes, a Rob Reiner joint with Michael Douglas, and the working-titled Life Itself.
"Morgan Freeman is my husband!" Hall--uhhh--Keaton almost squeals. "The Michael Douglas movie is more, it's a little lighter. Yeah. It's a romance."
Keaton's is also among the voices in Finding Dory, a sequel to Pixar's animated blockbuster, Finding Nemo, scheduled for 2016.
And then her next book, Let's Just Say It Wasn't Pretty, a follow-up to her infatuating autobiography, Then Again, is due this spring.
"It's really a group of essays on beauty and, kind of, on the role of being a woman as we progress along in life," L'Oréal Paris cosmetics' elder spokeswoman says. "So, yeah.
"It's not easy," the 68-year-old, frequently described "eccentric" continues about time and its tendency to march on.
"But most of life has elements of not being easy--all periods. I think it is, though, so wonder-filled. This is the part of life where the wonder of being alive is much more prevalent, and much more amazing. It seems some things are just too astonishing."
You'd think, given all those movies and books and commercials, we'd know Annie Hall-damnit!--Diane Keaton pretty well by now.
Astonishingly, no.
Here are eight more things about her, in her own words, that may have escaped you:
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