Woody Allen Calls Diane Keaton a ‘Beautiful Yokel’ in New Essay

Woody Allen has written an essay in tribute to his friend and ex-partner, Diane Keaton, in the Free Press. News of Keaton’s death came suddenly on October 11, and tributes to the actor have been pouring in from people like Goldie Hawn, Steve Martin, and Jane Fonda. In his essay, Allen writes about his amazement that “this beautiful yokel went on to become an award-winning actress and sophisticated fashion icon.” He also calls her “a hick, a rube, a hayseed,” and “If Huckleberry Finn was a gorgeous young woman.”

Allen’s enduring affection for Keaton is as evident on the page as his insistence that Los Angeles (where Keaton was born and raised) is a hick town. The two met when staging his play, Play It Again Sam. At first, the two were too shy to connect, but over one lunch their mutual defenses melted. “When we first met, I thought she was so charming, so beautiful, so magical, that I questioned my sanity. I thought: Was it possible to fall in love so quickly?” he writes.

Allen describes their relationship, including a Thanksgiving where he lost poker to her family, before their (to him) inexplicable breakup. “We had a few great personal years together and finally we both moved on, and why we parted only God and Freud might be able to figure out,” Allen says. “She went on to date a number of exciting men, all of them more fascinating than I was.” Even after their relationship ended, Allen says he valued her friendship and artistic judgement. “For all her shyness and self-effacing personality, she was totally secure in her own aesthetic judgment,” he writes. “Whether she was criticizing a movie of mine or a play of Shakespeare’s, she held both to the same standard.”