It’s highly likely that the last time I truly felt drawn to parenthood was the first time I ever watched the classic 1980s Diane Keaton film Baby Boom. The news of Keaton’s death last weekend ricocheted me right back to my discovery of the movie, probably around the age of 11 or 12. In it, Keaton plays JC Wyatt, a high-powered New York executive with a shoulder-padded dressing gown who unwittingly inherits a baby from a distant cousin. Initially she’d been horrified by baby Elizabeth but, faced with adopting her out to two turnips from Duluth, she decides to be a woman who has it all, nappies and Nasdaq.
Baby Boom isn’t Keaton’s most lauded film role – her first major part was in The Godfather and she won an Oscar for Annie Hall – but for me it’s her most memorable. I must have watched it 20 times as a child. I was almost certainly its best return customer at the local video shop. When I moved in with friends in crappy flats in college and beyond I acquired it on DVD and it became a hangover favourite, with its style, comfort and a truly dazzling performance by Keaton as JC.
When JC’s efforts at juggling a baby and a high-powered job crumble she breaks up with her yuppie boyfriend, buys a dilapidated farmhouse and moves to Vermont. One of Keaton’s greatest scenes comes when the local handyman tells her the well that serves her idyllic farmhouse has run dry. This comes after a multitude of similar money-pit house nightmares and she throws a long and comedically perfect fit, only to be revived by sexy local vet Sam Shephard. I may have been young the first time I saw Baby Boom but I was definitely put out that our local vet, the one who cleaned out the labrador’s stinky ears, wasn’t a Sam Shepard look-a-like.
[ Charming, eccentric and likeable, no star had energy quite like Diane KeatonOpens in new window ]
First crushes aside, it was Keaton’s bond with her main costar, Baby Elizabeth, that mesmerised me the most. I assumed the baby was Keaton’s own child because how else could there be such a connection? Finding out that not only was the child a working actor but she was played by twins was almost too much for my young brain to take. When JC turned her disastrous Vermont move into a hugely successful baby food enterprise, I became convinced that I was going to move to Vermont and start a hugely successful baby food enterprise.
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It’s fair to say that Diane Keaton films have remained steady favourites throughout my life. I probably wore out the VHS of Father of the Bride. The hysterical and camp First Wives Club is a cult classic for a reason. And then there’s Something’s Gotta Give, one of the classics of the heyday of early 2000s romcoms and a lesson in exemplary casting: Keanu Reeves as the toy-boy to Keaton and Jack Nicholson as the one she really loves. Keaton’s extended crying scene in Something’s Gotta Give is a gold-standard comedy moment.
As I embark on a rewatch of all of these classics there is one Keaton film that will hit the hardest. In The Family Stone, one of the greatest and most underrated Christmas films, she plays the snarky matriarch determined to deter her adored eldest son from marrying a neurotic outsider. Keaton isn’t her usual screwball self, rather she heads up a hostile, insular and ultimately relatable family. I cry every single year when I watch The Family Stone and between Keaton’s passing and the film’s edge of tragedy, I suspect 2025’s turn will be no different.
I’m surprised that, over the years, we haven’t made more as a country out of Keaton’s Irish roots. Her paternal grandmother Mary “Grammie” Hall was born in Nebraska to Irish Catholic parents with roots in Cork and Kerry while her paternal grandfather’s family hailed from Ulster. It’s a shame she never made it on to the Late Late because they would have had a field day.
I’ve never made it to Vermont despite my lifelong dream to visit the locations of Baby Boom and the home of JC Wyatt, who didn’t quite have it all but came fairly close. Keaton, meanwhile, never married and adopted two children in her 50s, so there’s time for me yet if a Baby Boom rewatch leaves me broody. I just don’t think I could ever pull off a crisp white shirt collar like Diane. Nobody could.
