In her 2011 memoir, Then Again, Diane Keaton recounted what she believed was her first memory. It was the mysterious sight of her mother. “It was almost as if I knew the world, and life in it, would be unfamiliar yet charged with an alluring, permanent, and questioning romance,” Keaton wrote. “As if I would spend the rest of my life trying to understand her.” The same could be said for Keaton, who died yesterday in Los Angeles, the city of her birth nearly 80 years ago.

Keaton was mysterious and romantic, beguiling and ever self-effacing. Young and old wished to know this fashionably layered woman of verve and eccentricity. “Her very nerve-ends tingle with glee: she is an affirmation of life, and especially of the part of it which is called fun,” Kenneth Tynan wrote of Katharine Hepburn, but also characteristic of Keaton, who emulated the mid-century actress’s work. Keaton’s 55-year film career offered a form of escapism — now a cultural bequest amid the AI assault on the vestiges of analog life.

If anything, Keaton was America’s last transcendent actress, one who commanded both celluloid and Instagram stories and whose fashion sense inspired generations of women to wear the tie or put on a turtleneck. To millennials and Zoomers, Keaton’s voice — always jittery and endearing — was the background noise of childhood, her films omniscient on television and watched repeatedly by mothers engaging in housework or finding that elusive moment of rest. “Diane Keaton was that rare figure who transcended generations, genres, and gender,” said Jake Mercier, co-host of Cinema Retro podcast, which revisits the golden age of moviemaking. “In an increasingly algorithmic age, Keaton’s singular warmth and offbeat grace remind us that true originality is something soulful, not synthetic.”

Amid pixelated fragmentation, Americans are losing their capacity for the referential. This is especially true for younger adults, who paradoxically buy vintage clothing and find wonderment in past aesthetics without any sense of the figures and forces before their time. Diane Keaton was a rare exception. “I miss the use of black-and-white cinematography,” Keaton told The New Yorker in a 1978 profile. “I also like black-and-white still photography…It takes you right there, into the past. You dwell in it, you get into that world, don’t you?”

Now, as AI distorts and erases any sense of black-and-white life, one must find agency elsewhere. It is Keaton’s films — especially those directed by Woody Allen and Nancy Meyers — that can offer a portal to American life from the Seventies to the turn of this vertiginous century. In the Seventies, Diane Keaton was the breakout co-lead in the early films of Woody Allen, who she dated for a time, under whose direction she exhibited the comedic timing of a silent film star. Allen’s Sleeper (1973) was a prescient and satiric film of a dystopian future eerily aligned with today’s cultural underpinnings. In the film, Keaton plays Allen’s love interest, one capable of issuing absurdist lines with total earnestness (“It’s pure keen,” she declares when seeing a work of gifted art).

Meanwhile, in Interiors (1978), Keaton, playing the poet daughter of a depressive mother, issues a nearly two-minute, haunting monologue on mortality (“The intimacy of it embarrasses me.”). Keaton won a best actress Oscar for her role in Annie Hall (1977), a resplendent snapshot of New York and Los Angeles during that period. In one brief nightclub scene, Keaton sings the Thirties tune, “Seems Like Old Times,” a memorable moment that’s ever more ethereal with her exit from life’s stage.

In Nancy Meyers’s films, Keaton appears as the figure younger audiences would come to adore. But it was Something’s Gotta Give (2003) that elicited younger generations’ greatest sense and affection for Keaton’s persona and an aesthetic — crisp and white, delightfully neurotic and buttoned up — that’s now immortal. Technology (laptops and instant messaging) plays a quiet role in the film, when digital communication was still a source of amusement, not agitation. “Something’s Gotta Give will always be my favourite movie,” Keaton wrote in her memoir.

Keaton’s death occurred on a weekend when there was already an acute sense of autumnal melancholy in New York, the city that launched Keaton’s acting career with her Broadway debut in 1968. In the city and elsewhere across America, it was one of those rare moments when a high-profile death forces a pause — and induces a palpable sadness for someone who was so enigmatic yet relatable.

“I liked her. I missed her already,” Dominick Dunne wrote after profiling Keaton for Vanity Fair in 1985. Keaton left that impression for posterity.