Diane Keaton is a Projector — built not for nonstop output but for the kind of clear, idiosyncratic seeing that makes a room recognize itself. Her career has always run on that recognition: Woody Allen casting her in Play It Again, Sam on Broadway in 1969, Francis Ford Coppola insisting on her as Kay Corleone when nobody else saw it, Warren Beatty pulling her into Reds. She didn't audition her way into the canon. She got invited into it, again and again, by directors who saw her before audiences did — which is exactly how waiting for the right invitation is supposed to work when it works.

She arrived in New York in the late sixties as Diane Hall (Keaton was her mother's maiden name) and started showing up in menswear that nobody had asked for — the ties, the bowler hats, the vests, the layered men's shirts that became Annie Hall's costume because she literally wore them to set. That insistence on dressing exactly like herself, even when stylists begged her not to, is the kind of stubborn self-fidelity that becomes its own aesthetic. It's also why her Annie Hall Oscar in 1977 felt less like a performance award than a confirmation: she had translated her actual nervous, brilliant, scattered way of talking into something the culture could finally name.

The 6/2 profile — the role-model hermit — tracks cleanly across her life. The messy experimental first act: living with Woody Allen, then Warren Beatty, then Al Pacino, each relationship ending without marriage, each leaving her more clearly herself. The long observational middle: directing documentaries, publishing photography books on clouds and lobbies and reservoirs, restoring Spanish Colonial houses in Los Angeles and selling them. She retreats into projects most actresses wouldn't touch, then returns with something — Something's Gotta Give, Book Club — that reminds everyone she's still the sharpest comic instrument of her generation.

Her decisions have a quick, unexplainable certainty to them. She adopted her daughter Dexter at 50 and her son Duke at 55, after deciding in a moment she's described as just knowing. She bought houses on instinct, sometimes sight-unseen, then renovated them with a precision other people found bewildering — every tile, every doorknob, every shade of white debated and chosen. She has an unusual nose for what's worth preserving, which is why she became one of Los Angeles's most committed architectural preservationists, fighting to save buildings the city had given up on.

She has never stopped finding new things to start — a singing album at 74, an Instagram presence that's somehow both completely sincere and quietly subversive, books about aging that refuse to apologize for any of it. She is openly, comfortably eccentric in a way that gives other women permission, which may be the most Projector thing about her: the wisdom isn't a lecture, it's a life lived visibly enough that you can borrow from it. At her best she's a catalyst dressed as a kook, provoking the culture into being a little weirder, a little freer, a little less embarrassed about itself.