I just read Daphne Merkin’s piece in the Times’ Magazine about Diane Keaton, one of my idols.

I surprise myself by writing that. And yet, really she is.

She is such a cool lady who encompasses so much: talent — both comedic and dramatic; always deep. Style: visionary and way out there but pretty stunning just the same.And she’s got creativity, brains and a real point of view. A stance, she might call it.

I once saw her waiting to get into the Performance Garage on Green Street in Soho and she looked ravishing and weird in an oversized bright orange spring coat. I think she was with a well-known photography dealer. And the fact that she was waiting to see a a play directed by the great avant-gardest Richard Forman…

Well, that’s exactly what I mean. She’s an interesting and unpredictable package with a history of cool choices: loving Al Pacino, photographing hotel lobbies, making a documentary film about heaven, appreciating mid-centruy architecture, adopting two children after 50. Merkin reports that Keaton is a loving and involved single-parent.

Of her relationship with Woody she says, "For a short period. He was the only one who would live with me while walking on eggshells, as he claimed I forced him to do." A little later in the article she admits that she’s glad she didn’t have children with any of the men she was involved with.

I think it’s probably the way she wears her insecurity on her sleeve that  makes her both real and awe inspiring. Her unmet quest for a great love in her life, her uncertaintly about her own beauty, her sense that she should have taken more risks – been less inside of herself – speaks to something in all of us.

Like us all, she has regrets, a deep well of psychological baggage, and a laundry list of reasons why she is the way she is. As she says in the article: "I’ve been talking my life away about deep conflicts that don’t go away," Keaton says of therapy. "I’m never leaving. It’s like going to church. Whether I’m helped or not is not the issue. It’s about trying to understand more about why something is the way it is, about my own participation in a problem."