Matthew Wilson
A longtime friend of Diane Keaton is mourning the loss of the Hollywood icon. Keaton passed away on Saturday, October 11, at 79.
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Speaking with People, songwriter Carole Bayer Sager reflected on her friendship with Keaton and that time they partnered together to record a song called “First Christmas.” That track dropped in November 2024 and ended up being the only solo track of the actor’s career.
- “I was just playing the song for my husband [Robert A. Daly, Board of Directors Chair at the American Film Institute]. We were listening to her sing this song [that] Jonas and I wrote, and she loved it so much.”
- “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. She was wonderful, she was wonderful. She was a magic light, you know, just for everyone.”
Diane Keaton Remembered
The songwriter also described what it was like working on the song with Keaton and how it came about as well.
- “I said, ‘Well, maybe I can write you a Christmas song.’ So Jonas and I wrote this song. And then she came over and not only fell in love with it, she started crying as it moved her, and she said, ‘Oh, I love this, this is so beautiful,'” Sager remembers.
- She continues, “So I said, ‘Well, why don’t you try and sing it?’ And she was so authentic when she sang it … she was sort of acting it, you know, because she is a great actress and, and then she’d start to cry when she was singing it.”
After Keaton passed away, Sager says that she is considering re-releasing the song in her honor. It is Christmas themed after all.
- “She sings about Christmas without you here, except when I listen to it now, she could be singing about herself, you know, which makes me very teary,” Sager said. “She had a great life, and she touched so many people with her gift of acting and writing and even singing.”
“She just was a great light on this earth and loved life,” Sager also said about Keaton
