The late Diane Keaton, who died Saturday at age 79, once admitted she thought she and Al Pacino would get married during their five-year relationship — and the fact that they did not was “a blessing for both of us.” Keaton went on to intentionally build a life that did not include marriage.
“I didn’t even want him to propose. I just thought maybe he would marry me, eventually. I thought, ‘don’t even propose — let’s just do it.’ But that never happened, and that is a blessing for both of us. It would have been a nightmare for him,” she told Neil Fisher, The Times of London’s executive editor of culture and books, in 2017. Fisher recounted the story in a new article published Sunday.
“We’re very eccentric, he needed a woman that was going to take care of him, I needed a man who would take care of me … It was just very important that we left each other alone, said goodbye,” she continued. “But it wasn’t my choice.”
Keaton and Pacino met on the set of “The Godfather” and began a five-year, on-off relationship. The actress also mused on the relationship in a 2013 interview with the Telegraph in which she admitted she was “really very taken” with Pacino from the beginning of their relationship.
“Our relationship was absolutely wonderful in some ways, but is he the love of my life?” she asked. “No, not really, because he wasn’t the love ‘of my life’ … He was the love of that time of my life. Each man had a different decade.”
The duo also discussed Keaton’s personal and professional affiliation with Woody Allen. She starred in eight of his films and defended the actor against accusations he sexually assaulted his daughter Dylan Farrow.
Keaton explained that she was most attracted to how Allen’s mind worked. She said, “The actual attraction was how funny he was. And it’s hard to wrap your mind around somebody as brilliant as he is, because he didn’t act like it.”
“He was like an idiot, but he was really fun,” Keaton continued. “And then when he started writing these insanely brilliant female characters — that’s when I started to really understand his gift.”
Read the full interview with Diane Keaton at The Times.
