Nancy Meyers is looking back at her decades of collaborations with Diane Keaton and noting that the “past 48 hours have not been easy” since the Oscar-winning actress died on Saturday.
While praising Keaton as a performer, Meyers, who wrote Baby Boom and the Father of the Bride films and directed Something’s Gotta Give, looked back on their close working relationship.
“As a woman, I lost a friend of almost 40 years – at times over those years, she felt like a sister because we shared so many truly memorable experiences,” she wrote in part on Instagram Monday. “As a filmmaker, I’ve lost a connection with an actress that one can only dream of.”
She added, “We all search for that someone who really gets us, right? Well, with Diane, I believe we mutually had that. I always felt she really got me so writing for her made me better because I felt so secure in her hands.”
Though, she clarified, it wasn’t just that Keaton could be funny or vulnerable in her films, Keaton did it in projects with Woody Allen, Warren Beatty (Reds) and others that she worked with.
“Diane did exactly the same for them because that is what she does. She goes deep,” Meyers wrote. “And I know those who have worked with her know what I know… she made everything better.”
After offering some insight into Keaton’s character’s crying scenes in Something’s Gotta Give and how she’d “sometimes spin in a kind of goofy circle before a take to purposely get herself off balance or whatever she needed to shed so she could be in the moment,” Meyers called her late friend “fearless.”
In closing, Meyers wrote, “She was like nobody ever, she was born to be a movie star, her laugh could make your day and for me, knowing her and working with her — changed my life. Thank you Di. I’ll miss you forever.”
Keaton died Saturday at the age of 79, according to a statement obtained by People, as TMZ reported that an ambulance arrived at her home and took her to a hospital shortly after 8 a.m.
Keaton won the best actress Oscar for her role as the titular character in Annie Hall and was nominated for the award three more times, including for 2003’s Something’s Gotta Give, in which she starred as a playwright who becomes involved with a womanizer played by Jack Nicholson.
Read Meyers’ full tribute below.
More to come.
