Diane Keaton

Keaton was born Diane Hall in Los Angeles, California on January 5, 1946. Her mother, Dorothy Deanne (née Keaton), was a homemaker and amateur photographer; her father, John Newton Ignatius "Jack" Hall, was a real estate broker and civil engineer, whose mother had come from Ireland. Keaton was raised a Free Methodist by her mother. Her mother won the "Mrs. Los Angeles" pageant for homemakers; Keaton has said that the theatricality of the event inspired her first impulse to be an actress, and led to her desire to work on stage. She has also credited Katharine Hepburn, whom she admires for playing strong and independent women, as one of her inspirations. Keaton is a 1964 graduate of Santa Ana High School in Santa Ana, California. During her time there, she participated in singing and acting clubs at school, and starred as Blanche DuBois in a school production of A Streetcar Named Desire. After graduation, she attended Santa Ana College, and later Orange Coast College as an acting student, but dropped out after a year to pursue an entertainment career in Manhattan. Upon joining the Actors' Equity Association, she changed her surname to Keaton, which was her mother's maiden name, as there was already an actress registered under the name of Diane Hall. For a brief time she also moonlighted at nightclubs with a singing act. She revisited her nightclub act in Annie Hall (1977), And So It Goes (2014), and a cameo in Radio Days (1987). Keaton began studying acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York City. She initially studied acting under the Meisner technique, an ensemble acting technique first evolved in the 1930s by Sanford Meisner, a New York stage actor/acting coach/director who had been a member of The Group Theater (1931–1940). She describes her acting technique as, "[being] only as good as the person you're acting with ... As opposed to going it on my own and forging my path to create a wonderful performance without the help of anyone. I always need the help of everyone!" According to fellow actor Jack Nicholson, "She approaches a script sort of like a play in that she has the entire script memorized before you start doing the movie, which I don't know any other actors doing that."