Diane KeatonwasWoody Allen‘s ex-girlfriend and muse when she played the lead in his 1977 hit film,Annie Hall —but she wasn’t the only one who served as inspiration.
In her new memoir,Brother & Sister, the 74-year-old star explains that Annie’s troubled brother Duane (Christopher Walken) was based on her own brother John Randolph Hall, an artist who hasstruggled with mental illness, alcoholism, and dark fantasieshis whole life. Now 71, Hall suffers from dementia and lives in a care facility, where his sister visits him weekly.
“Sometimes, when I’m driving on the road at night, I see two headlights coming toward me fast,” Duane tells Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) in the film. “I have this sudden impulse to turn the wheel quickly, head into the oncoming car. I can anticipate the explosion. The sound of shattering glass. The flames rising out of the flowing gasoline.”
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“Reality, you know? Reality was not something Randy could handle,” Keaton says in an exclusive interview featured in this week’s issue of PEOPLE.
One of the few things that always brought him joy — even when Hall, then 65, was showing early signs of dementia and institutionalized — was his collage work. It became a safe outlet for alarming fantasies he had about hurting women. He also shared these visions with his sister.
“My fantasies are even worse now, but at least I know they’re fantasies,” Hall wrote to Keaton in a letter she includes in her book. “I’m not going to do anything. I have to say, holding it back all those years makes me believe I am a moral man. James Ellroy used to break into houses and steal underwear. I can’t even do that… I couldn’t, but boy could I dream of it.”
The actress with her brother.Courtesy Diane Keaton
Randy Hall.
“I never worried he would act on his fantasies,” she says. “There was no indication he would, in anything he’d ever done. He didn’t have that bone in his body. He wrote about them and did collages instead.”
She also wasn’t concerned about Hall’s response to his portrayal inAnnie Hall.
“I felt it was a cartoon character, so I wasn’t that worried about Randy’s impression of it,” she says. In fact, Annie’s family of cocktail-drinking WASPs in the film was a variation on Keaton’s.
For the full Diane Keaton interview and an excerpt from her new memoir, pick this week’s issue of PEOPLE, on stands Friday.
Brother & Sisterhits bookstores on Feb. 4.
source: people.com
