The movie that made me a Diane Keaton fan for life

Yes, she was brilliant in "Annie Hall." But, in my book, nothing compares with "Baby Boom."

The world lost a true original this weekend when Diane Keaton died at age 79.

Even though the Oscar-winning actor was almost 80, her death came as a surprise. She was not publicly known to be sick, no cause of death has been disclosed, and she possessed a distinctive personal style and kooky effervescence that made her feel ageless.

Her death is an especially painful loss for those of us, especially women, who saw Keaton as an offbeat, free-thinking kindred spirit. Though she dated legendary Hollywood leading men, including Warren Beatty, Al Pacino and Woody Allen, she never married because, as she once said, “I didn’t want to give up my independence.”

Undeniably radiant onscreen, she eagerly bucked Hollywood beauty standards from the earliest days of her career (Exhibit A: this Tonight Show interview from 1972, in which Johnny Carson struggles to comprehend why his guest is wearing a suit and clogs) and, through her indelible performances in movies from Annie Hall to Something’s Gotta Give, gave other women permission to be their wonderfully awkward, imperfect selves.

In my circle of friends, we referred to Keaton as “Auntie Diane,” because we imagined her as a fabulously eccentric, endearingly chaotic female elder, someone whose zaniness was matched by her accomplishments. (I am pretty sure the “Auntie Diane” thing started with this legendarily unhinged interview in 2012.)

She rose to fame in the 1970s, as young auteurs such as Francis Ford Coppola were remaking American cinema. Over the course of a decade, she racked up an astonishing string of screen credits, including The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, Reds, Annie Hall, Manhattan, and Looking for Mr. Goodbar. She was a generational talent as formidable as Pacino or Robert De Niro, but was arguably even more versatile, shifting with ease between witty comedies, psychosexual thrillers, and historical sagas. Later, she evolved into the reliably bankable star of grown-up comedies with high replay value, like The First Wives’ Club, Father of the Bride, and The Family Stone. (She also branched out to become a director, author, home renovator, and single mom).

Keaton was a fixture in American film for so long, starring in so many beloved classics and underappreciated gems across so many genres that her body of work truly contains something for everyone in every phase of life.

Like everyone else, I love her performance in Annie Hall.

But my Keaton gateway drug—the movie that made me a forever fan—was Baby Boom, the breezy 1987 comedy in which she starred as a Manhattan yuppie unexpectedly thrust into motherhood. Directed by Charles Shyer, it gets less praise than other films in Keaton’s oeuvre, but to me it perfectly captures her star persona and her appeal to multiple generations of women. As J.C. Wiatt, a management consultant on the partnership track, she is by turns fierce, vulnerable, steely, flustered, and—most of all—very funny.

The film opens with shots of professional women rushing to work on the New York City streets as a narrator notes that 53% of the workforce is female. “As little girls, they were told to grow up and marry doctors and lawyers. Instead, they grew up and became doctors and lawyers,” she says.

Keaton’s J.C. is one of these newly empowered women who “moved out of the pink ghetto and into the executive suite.” A Harvard MBA with a corner office on Park Avenue, she lives with her boyfriend, Steven (Harold Ramis), an investment banker who is equally career-driven, in a co-op they own together. “One would take it for granted that a woman like this has it all,” says the narrator. “One must never take anything for granted.”

J.C.’s carefully managed life is instantly turned upside-down when her long-lost cousin is killed in an accident and she inherits his adorable 14-month-old baby, Elizabeth (played by twins Kristina and Michelle Kennedy). J.C. struggles to change diapers, find a reliable nanny, and remove the spaghetti stains from the gray walls of her sleek apartment. When she loses her boyfriend and dream job in quick succession, J.C. decides to start over with Elizabeth in Vermont. She moves into a dreamy farmhouse, accidentally stumbles into a new career as a baby food magnate, and sparks up a romance with a hunky vet played by Sam Shepard.

Released a year after a notorious Newsweek cover story that claimed that single, college-educated women over 40 had a better chance of being killed in a terrorist attack than finding a mate, Baby Boom dramatized what was then a relatively new phenomenon: the high-powered working mother. The movie wears its feminist heart on the sleeve of its tweed power blazer (right below the giant shoulder pads), portraying corporate America as utterly unaccommodating to working mothers.

Decades before bestselling authors grappled with questions about how women can and should balance family and career, Baby Boom did so with a humorous touch. Though much about the movie feels dated in 2025 (the saxophone-heavy score, some cringy jokes), most surprising is how much of it feels as if it could have been written today, particularly its skewering of upscale, Type-A helicopter parents.

I couldn’t tell you the first time I saw Baby Boom, though I am quite sure I watched it with my mom sometime in the late ‘80s, on a VHS tape rented at Blockbuster (or possibly even the library). Although I was too young to appreciate some aspects of the film—like Shepard’s rugged appeal or the sly jokes about J.C.’s lackluster sex life—Keaton’s comic brilliance transcended any barriers of age and sophistication. I didn’t know what valium was or why Keaton’s character was taking it, but I did understand that carrying a baby sideways was very, very funny—and that being a mom could be comically difficult.

Keaton pretty much carries the entire movie, making it easy to overlook the numerous implausible plot twists. (I repeat: long-lost cousin who dies in a car accident.) Both her witty, tender performance and her wardrobe are Katharine Hepburn-esque, and the film feels like a screwball comedy reimagined in the wake of Second Wave feminism. Keaton was a master of the cinematic meltdown, and Baby Boom features several of her most memorable freakouts.

As I’ve gotten older and watched Baby Boom over and over again, I’ve come to appreciate it in a more visceral way. It’s a movie that captures both the rage-inducing frustration and the intoxicating highs of motherhood. And it also embodies a very specific kind of female fantasy. Cooped up in her house with no job to distract her, J.C. starts making applesauce with fruit from the orchard on her 62-acre property, then starts selling it locally under the brand Country Baby. She quickly becomes a Martha Stewart-like entrepreneur, her remarkable journey from frazzled mom to baby food tycoon illustrated in one of the greatest “rise-to-the-top” montages in cinematic history.

Baby Boom marked Keaton’s first collaboration with Nancy Meyers, who went on to become a director known for immaculately designed, female-driven movies that dabble in real estate porn (including The Holiday, It’s Complicated, and the Keaton vehicle Something’s Gotta Give). Baby Boom, which Meyers produced and co-wrote with Shyer, her then-husband, surely inspired countless daydreams about moving to New England, starting an artisanal food company, and falling for a hot, sensitive, and inexplicably single local. Even now, it’s hard to watch Baby Boom without swooning over J.C.’s wood-paneled ‘80s Jeep, her buttery yellow farmhouse, and her cozy knitwear.

When the movie was released, some critics slammed it as regressive because it showed a high-powered career woman who embraced domesticity. But Shyer and Meyers had the opposite goal: “We endeavored to move the audience to think and recognize the increasing prejudice women face today,” they wrote in a letter to The New York Times.

In the movie’s climactic scene, J.C. rejects an offer to buy her baby food business for millions and confronts the boss who told her that women couldn’t get ahead in business as easily as men. “Do you remember that night when you told me about the things that I was going to have to give up and the sacrifices that I was going to make?” she asks. “Well, I don’t want to make those sacrifices. And the bottom line is, nobody should have to.”

Meredith Blake is The Contrarian’s culture columnist.

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