When Diane Keaton was a girl in Santa Ana, she began to collect photographs of Cary Grant, placing them in a cherished scrapbook. She had just seen The Philadelphia Story, starring Grant and Katharine Hepburn, for the first time. Grant was dazzlingly handsome, of course, but something else about him had leapt off the screen and captured her imagination.Where Hepburn was gorgeous in a high-society way—all those gowns accentuating her trim waist, the dramatic shoulder-padded jackets, her fabulous mid-Atlantic accent—Keaton couldn’t take her eyes off Grant, who seemed to be having a better time than anyone else. “He wore things like white cardigan sweaters thrown ever so casually over his shoulders after a game of tennis, or a tuxedo with a white bow tie for afternoon tea, just for the fun of it,” Keaton recalled in one of her memoirs, Let’s Just Say It Wasn’t Pretty. “He wasn’t afraid of a polka-dot tie or handkerchief. He wore gray worsted wool suits with wide lapels, a waist button, a white shirt, and his collar up.” As she collated images of Grant, she also carefully recorded his fashion tips—the importance of a taut knot when tying a tie, the maxim that “clothes make the man,” and so on. To Keaton, Grant represented a formative encounter with the elusive quality that she would spend the rest of her life chasing: beauty.Keaton, who died yesterday at age 79, was drawn to the stage, and then the screen, in an industry that remains obsessed with a shallower definition of beautiful. But from a young age, Keaton seemed to understand that actual beauty, the timeless kind, required a degree of depth, even darkness. It demanded originality and unconventionality, as well as fierce independence. These were the qualities that captivated her most. And they are the ones that describe her best.Read: Diane Keaton’s very different kind of memoirKeaton was born in Los Angeles in 1946 as Diane Hall, and she grew up in a one-story tract house in a neighborhood that was eventually partly razed for the construction of Interstate 5. Her childhood was happy, filled with Barbie dolls, little notes from her mother with advice like “find a reason to love yourself every day,” and social gatherings with laughing neighbors. She remembered her parents inviting everyone over to watch the swallows return to Capistrano, and the couple across the street who doted on her, piling bright red cherries into a tall glass of 7Up, a drink she loved so much she swore she’d someday drink it in heaven.Insecurities dogged Keaton throughout her life. She worried about the shape of her eyes, the shape of her body, and about being pretty but plain. She wanted to look like Doris Day, but the only person people told her she had a striking resemblance to was Amelia Earhart—perhaps on account of her adventurous spirit. She was, as she put it, “a wild child on the cliffs of Laguna Beach, a pioneer rolling down the sand-duned banks of Death Valley.” But Keaton always saw herself as “an ordinary girl who became an ordinary woman.” The only extraordinary thing about her, she once said, was the strong will she inherited from her mother.On screen, Keaton’s characters tend to betray vulnerability: It comes through in the crinkle of a worried brow, the gee-whiz uneasiness, the absent-minded twirling of hair. The audience might wonder how much of this was performance, and how much of it was just her. Consider Keaton as Erica Barry in Something’s Gotta Give fumbling apologetically through her first kiss with Jack Nicholson as Harry; as Carol Lipton in Manhattan Murder Mystery, charmingly oblivious to Alan Alda’s character’s advances; as Nina Banks trying to discreetly wave over her reluctant husband, played by Steve Martin, to meet their future son-in-law in Father of the Bride; as Annie Hall wallowing in self-deprecation when she first meets Alvy Singer (“Oh God, Annie. Well, oh well. La di da, la di da, la la”); as Kay Corleone staring at her husband as the door closes in the last shot of The Godfather. All of it was acting, but all of it was unmistakably Keaton, too. In her memoir Then Again, Keaton tells the story of that kiss with Nicholson, and how she lost track of whether she was herself or the character she was playing. “I forgot I was in a movie,” she wrote. She kept forgetting her lines. “The only thing I remembered was not to forget to kiss Jack.”Diane Keaton photographed in her Manhattan apartment, in April 1977 (Credit: Jill Krementz)Growing up, “there was always something interfering with getting things right,” Keaton recalled in Let’s Just Say It Wasn’t Pretty. “A question (the wrong kind), a hesitancy, and always, always the mangling of my sentences, the stammers, the ums, the you-knows, the oh-wells, the I-don’t-knows. I was inept, inexact, imprecise.” That these same mannerisms would end up helping her professionally always surprised her. (She dedicated that book to “all the women who can’t get to right without being wrong.”) Even when she achieved superstardom, she downplayed her talent, if unconvincingly, calling it second nature for her to play “birdbrains and spoiled brats.”Although she was a gifted actor, Keaton also cast a photographer’s eye on everything she encountered. In the 1970s, she converted a bedroom in her Upper East Side apartment into a darkroom. (This was the same apartment where she adorned one wall with a series of self-portraits she’d taken in a subway photo booth.) More recently, she told The New York Times that she was on a quest to find and purchase every book of photography ever published. “I know, I know—ridiculous. But so what?” she said. She described wanting to buy an old warehouse and turn it into a massive library of “image-driven books.” When remembering her father, the question that preoccupied her most was whether, when she gazed out at the ocean, she was seeing it the way that he once did. She once described talking to him after his death: “Dad, can I ask you something from the other side of the great mystery? How much of what you saw is what I see? It might sound crazy, but sometimes I believe I’m seeing things from inside your eyes.”Keaton was, in other words, a romantic above all. She fell in love easily with the world around her, and with men. She remembered vividly what it felt like the first time she laid eyes on Al Pacino, at a bar in New York, before they both auditioned for the parts they would get in The Godfather: “His face, his nose, and what about those eyes? I kept trying to figure out what I could do to make them mine. They never were. That was the lure of Al. He was never mine. For the next twenty years I kept losing a man I never had.” Keaton and Pacino had an on-again-off-again romance for years. After a failed attempt to get him to marry her—which involved her giving him an ultimatum in Rome while they filmed The Godfather III—she vowed never to marry anyone, and she didn’t, although she adopted two children and raised them on her own. And while she envied those who married and stayed together their whole lives, she wrote, for her, “my love of the impossible far overshadowed the rewards of longevity.”Diane Keaton, in her Manhattan apartment in 1977, sits beneath a series of self-portraits she took in a subway photo booth. (Credit: Jill Krementz)Keaton also famously dated Woody Allen and Warren Beatty. And she had a forever crush on Jack Nicholson, whom she met in her thirties. “I didn’t want to be his friend. I wanted him to kiss me. It didn’t happen,” she remembered. (Later, after they starred together in Something’s Gotta Give, they became close friends. She wrote him love letters anyway, one of which she quoted in one of her memoirs: “Looking at you for as long as I have has made it easy for me to come to the conclusion that your face is the best face I’ve ever seen.”) But there was never anyone like Pacino. (Decades after they’d broken up for the last time, she saw him in an appearance on CNN and got so distraught that she threw up, she wrote in a memoir.) “After Al, I began building a wall around my vulnerability. More hats. Long-sleeved everything. Coats in the summer. Boots with knee socks and wool suits with scarves at the beach.”When Keaton was in her sixties, trying to come to grips with some of the indignities of aging, she occasionally tried—and failed—to challenge herself not to wear a hat out in public for once. She knew her trademark style had become a security blanket. This was Keaton in a nutshell: ferociously herself, yet never fully comfortable in her own skin. “Most of us over sixty have come to the point where we recognize that our accomplishments are diddly-quat in the grand scheme of things,” she once wrote. But she’d still wake up in the morning, look in the mirror, and sigh. And she had to work to remind herself that life itself was a gift—or, in her words, “Be grateful for what you have, you big jerk.”Beauty was everywhere to Keaton, and she learned that you sometimes had to push yourself to see it, sometimes even when it was right in front of you. “If we’re lucky,” she wrote, “we have a long time to consider what beauty means.” Beauty, to her, was the sound of Woody Allen teasingly calling her a “half-wit.” It was the unexpected thrill of running into an old friend on the street. It was Grand Central Station, a monument to humanity, both because it was built in the first place and because it survived almost being torn down. Beauty was in the misspelled, handwritten notes from her children. It was See’s Candies peanut brittle, her favorite dessert. It was the birds she could hear chirping on the telephone wire outside of her window when she was feeling down. It was Abraham Lincoln’s long face, a portrait of which she hung on her wall among photographs of her favorite men—48 all together—in a floor-to-ceiling tribute. It was her own bare feet in the mulch of a redwood forest, running toward her son. It was, she wrote, paraphrasing the Vogue editor Diana Vreeland, a lifetime spent looking for something she’d never seen before.And it was in the things she couldn’t stop seeing, even if she tried: Pacino’s dark eyes, the sound of his voice reading Macbeth to her at midnight, the way he called her “Di,” and the memory of him describing to her the autumn light on the street in the Bronx where he grew up. She saved scraps of their romance—including eight pink slips from the Shangri-La Hotel in 1987, that say, “Call from Al”—until the very end. But most of all, it was the Pacific Ocean, the same ancient body of water that she and her father could stare at for hours, “the first wonder of the world” as she once put it. Sparkling and irresistible but also deep, dark, and above all, beautiful.