Oscar-winning actress Diane Keaton, known for her roles in Annie Hall and The First Wives Club, had ambitions beyond her acting career.
The late actress, who passed away on October 11, had a lifelong dream of becoming a singer and released her first original song less than a year before her death.
Keaton’s single “First Christmas” debuted in November 2024, when Keaton was 78 years old. This week, the song debuted at No. 22 on Billboard’s Digital Song Sales chart, marking Keaton’s first solo chart appearance.
Making music was something Keaton had been thinking about decades before he released “First Christmas.”
“I had a dream of being a nightclub singer that I carried into my early 20s,” Keaton said in a 2014 interview with film critic Richard Krauss.
“I sang at a few gigs, but I wasn’t very good at it. I started to realize that I wasn’t going to be a singer.”
Still, Keaton could not give up his desire to sing. “I love this,” she said. “I love music. I love singing ballads and sad songs. It’s so much fun.”
Throughout her career as an actress, Keaton sang and recorded songs with cast members for Broadway productions of “Hair” and for film soundtracks such as “And Then There We Go.” However, her 2024 Christmas single, written by songwriters Carol Bayer Sager and Jonas Myrin, marked her first chance to release a song on her own.
In a message shared on Instagram, Keaton said the opportunity to sing the song was “the most beautiful gift I could ever have imagined.”
“She loved recording this song and working with me and Jonas… She kept asking, ‘Are you going to work on this song? Are you going to sing it?’ … She was almost childish about it,” Ms. Sager told People magazine shortly after her death.
Asked in 2015 if she always wanted to be an actress, Keaton told Cinephilia & Beyond that singing was what she had her eye on. Her love of music inevitably led her to acting.
“Singing was first. Music. I mean, if you think about it, music was first for me. Music fills the emptiness in the soul, God, music is the ultimate revelation,” Keaton said.
“Music is by far the best of all the arts because it makes you feel the moment, and it’s thrilling. So singing always came first, and that’s how music started.”
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