DIANE KEATON

The Hollywood original on movies, love and why she isn’t ready to retire.

Afew days before she accepted her Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Film Institute, Diane Keaton was a bundle of nerves. What if she stopped the show—and not in a good way? The event “goes on endlessly, and then I have to speak,” she told WHO. “What I would like to do is drink, but I don’t want to weave up there and fall down!”

Luckily, she remained upright through the star-studded gala in June, as peers including Meryl Streep and her ex Woody Allen paid tribute.

“I’m honoured, but it’s like a retirement party!” jokes Keaton, 71. Sure, Streep got the award 13 years ago, and she’s hardly out to pasture, “but that’s Meryl,” Keaton says. “Some of us are more . . . human.”

That humanness, of course, goes a long way toward explaining Keaton’s success. From Annie Hall through to Something’s Gotta Give, the LA native has projected a kooky, relatable vulnerability. There’s also her acting skill and comic genius—but she downplays those. “I don’t know what playing a character means,” she says. “What I really do is the best I can do with me.”

Her former love Woody Allen presented Keaton with her AFI Award on June 8. “Much of what I have accomplished in my life,” he said, “I owe to her.” A MUSE’S MOMENT

Though she and Al Pacino never wed, Keaton played his wife in 1972’s The Godfather and counts him among her “many loves.” “Look at that laugh. How adorable is he? But I hated that wig. It was two times as big as my head.” “I had one problem with my...

AGE OF AQUARIUS After winning a role in Hair on Broadway in 1968, Keaton was told to lose weight. “That was the start of my bulimia period,” she says. “I became a master at hiding. Analysis got me out of it.”

BIG-HAIR DAYS “In high school I was consumed by hairspray. I refused to be in the wind. I look like an idiot.”