Diane Keaton, Oscar-winning actress known for her roles in “Annie Hall” and “The First Wives Club,” had aspirations beyond her acting career.
The late actress, who passed away on Oct. 11, had a lifelong dream of being a singer, and less than a year before her passing, she released her first original song.
Keaton’s single, “First Christmas,” debuted in November 2024, when the actress was 78 years old. This week, the song entered the Billboard “Digital Song Sales” chart at No. 22, earning Keaton her first solo entry on the charts.
Creating music was something Keaton was thinking about several decades before releasing “First Christmas.”
“I had a fantasy of being a nightclub singer that I carried through even into my early 20s,” Keaton said in 2014 in an interview with film critic Richard Crouse.
“I sang a couple of gigs, as they call them, but I was not very good. I began to understand that I was not going to be a singer.”
Still, Keaton couldn’t shake her desire to sing. “I have this love of it,” she said. “I love music. I love singing ballads and sad songs, it’s just so much fun.”
Throughout her journey as an actress, Keaton sang and recorded songs alongside her casts for performances in “Hair” on Broadway and for the soundtrack of films like “And So It Goes.” But her 2024 Christmas single, written by songwriters Carole Bayer Sager and Jonas Myrin, was her first chance at releasing a song on her own.
In a message Keaton shared on Instagram, she said the opportunity to sing the song was “the most beautiful gift I could ever imagine.”
“She so loved recording this song and working with me and Jonas … she’d never stopped asking, ‘Are we gonna work on the song? Am I gonna sing?’ … She just was almost childlike about it,” Sager told People Magazine shortly after her passing.
When asked if she always knew she wanted to be an actress in 2015, Keaton told Cinephilia & Beyond that it was singing she had her eyes set on. Her love of music inevitably led her to acting.
“Singing was the first thing. Music. I mean, when you think about it music is first with me. It fills the emptiness of the soul, God, music is the ultimate revelation,” Keaton said.
“Music is by far the greatest of all the arts to just place you into a moment and that’s thrilling. So singing was always first and that’s how it started.”
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