Diane Keaton Once Admitted It Wouldn’t Have Been ‘a Good Idea’ to Get Married: ‘I’m Really Glad I Didn’t’

Diane Keaton may have shared romances with some of Hollywood’s most famous leading men — but the Oscar-winning star, who died at age 79 in California on October 11, always knew marriage wasn’t for her.

In one of her most revealing interviews, the beloved actress opened up to People in 2019 about why she chose to stay single.

“Today I was thinking about this,” she told the outlet. “I’m 73 and I think I’m the only one in my generation, and maybe before, who has been a single woman all her life.”

The Annie Hall icon famously dated Al Pacino, Warren Beatty and Woody Allen — yet she never walked down the aisle. Reflecting on that decision, she admitted it would not “have been a good idea for me to have married,” adding, “I’m really glad I didn’t, and I’m sure they’re happy about it, too.”

Keaton revealed that her reluctance to marry stretched all the way back to her teenage years. “I remember one day in high school, this guy came up to me and said, ‘One day you’re going to make a good wife,’” she recalled. “And I thought, ‘I don’t want to be a wife. No.’”

Even in her later years, the actress said she had no interest in dating again.

Speaking to AARP in 2023, she confessed, “I don’t date,” calling it “highly unlikely” she’d ever pursue another relationship. “I don’t remember anyone calling me, going, ‘This is So-and-So, I’d like to take you out.’ They don’t happen. Of course not.”

Though she never married, Keaton found love in motherhood, adopting her daughter, Dexter, and son, Duke, in her 50s.

“I didn’t think that I was ever going to be prepared to be a mother,” she told Ladies’ Home Journal in 2008, per HuffPost. “Motherhood was not an urge I couldn’t resist. It was more like a thought I’d been thinking for a very long time. So I plunged in.”

Her children have largely stayed out of the spotlight — something Keaton saw as a blessing.

“They have no interest in what I do, which I think is very healthy,” she told People back in 2007. “We live a relatively normal — well, sort of normal — life.”