Diane Keaton grew close to several of her Hollywood costars in the years before her death, including Jack Nicholson.
The twosome costarred in 1981’s Reds and the 2003 rom-com Something’s Gotta Give, the latter of which was directed by Nancy Meyers and earned Keaton an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress.
For Nicholson, working with Keaton was full of laughter and thrill.
“Like me, inside she’s pretty wild about fooling around and you can say anything to Diane,” he said in 2003, per IGN. “Sometimes, her preparation, I’ll walk up to her and she’ll look me in the eye and say, ‘You’re disgusting.’ ‘What?’ ‘You’re disgusting,’ and it makes you laugh and she’s a very original thinker too, as a person. On a movie, you stand and talk and we have a past relationship of affection and like one another very much. So, it makes that part of the day, sometimes the down hours, certainly that part is very interesting.”
The actor continued, “She’s nothing if not fascinating, and working with her, she’s very unpredictable, which I like. She’s very disciplined about it all. She approaches a script sort of like a play in that she has the entire script memorized before you start doing the movie which I don’t know any other actors doing that. In fact, it’s almost a craft axiom that it’s best if you learn it day by day and then, forget it.”
Keaton died on October 11, 2025, at age 79. A cause of death was not immediately revealed. Hollywood tributes poured in for the star, who had built a career around versatility, activism and a wide range of passions that went beyond acting.
Scroll below for more on Keaton and Nicholson’s friendship before her death.
Keaton and Nicholson’s Long-Awaited Reunion
While Keaton and Nicholson had first collaborated on Reds, she admitted she was equally “terrified” and “thrilled” to work with him again years later.
“Yeah, I mean I hadn’t seen Jack, besides passing him like twice in 25 years,” she said in Venice Magazine’s Dec/Jan 2003 issue. “So I didn’t know what he would be like. Because in that span of time, you know, Jack became larger than legendary. He became a national treasure, which has not exactly happened to me. You know, I would see him on television peripherally at a Lakers game or read about him on the cover of Time Magazine or see him at an awards show. I didn’t know who he was.”
A Movie Scene With Keaton Left Nicholson Weak in the Knees
Meyers revealed behind the scenes details about the scene in which Keaton and Nicholson’s Something’s Gotta Give characters professed their love for each other.
“We’re rehearsing that scene in the street, where he’s running after her, and he calls me over after one rehearsal. He’s all rattled,” Meyers told Vulture in April 2018. “I said, ‘What’s up?’ And he goes, ‘Diane just told me she loves me.’ I couldn’t tell if he was horrified or thrilled. So I was like, ‘Yes, I know, I wrote that line. It’s in the script, Jack.’ And he said, ‘Oh, OK.’ He thought she meant it. It’s really funny. That’s her.”
‘Something’s Gotta Give’ Had a Special Place in Keaton’s Heart
Keaton called Something’s Gotta Give her “favorite film” in her 2011 memoir, Then Again. The actress recalled a moment after the movie was released when a check “with a lot of zeros arrived in the mail for my back-end percentage.” She later found out that Nicholson had given her a cut of his earnings from the movie’s gross, per The Guardian.
Keaton Revealed Her Crush on Nicholson
Keaton admitted her and Nicholson’s onscreen chemistry was hard to ignore.
“I’ve had the biggest crush on him for 20 years,” she once said, per The Standard. “How can you not, even now? He’s irresistible. Did I tell him that? Sure, he knows. I told him all the time.”
Keaton Attended Nicholson’s Birthday Party Before She Died
Ed Begley Jr., who costarred with Keaton in 2018’s Book Club, revealed one of his last interactions with her before her death.
“I saw her fairly recently at Jack Nicholson’s birthday party, and it was good to see her there,” Begley Jr. told People in October 2025. “She loved Jack Nicholson, as I do, and Jack loved her. So I don’t mean to speak for him. I’m sure he’s as devastated as I am by her loss.”
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