Most actors treat a love scene as something to grit their teeth through. Hollywood Icon Diane Keaton saw it differently. For her, a good on-screen kiss was a bonus, not a burden. The late star was always candid about how much she liked that side of the work, and she happily played critic when it came to the leading men she’d kissed over the years.
The Co-Star Who Topped Her List
GettyWhen she was asked to pick the best kiss of her career, Keaton handed the title to her “5 Flights Up” co-star Morgan Freeman.
Jack Nicholson made the cut too, though she confessed that one carried a touch of embarrassment. Keaton and Nicholson starred together in “Something’s Gotta Give,” the 2003 romantic comedy that called for one love scene after another.
The way she told it, neither of them found the assignment easy. “Jack and I were humiliated most of the time,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 2003. “There was so much kissing and all this time in bed. We felt so much terror about being so exposed, and we got to be so close because of that.”
Inside ‘Something’s Gotta Give’
In the film, Nicholson is in the role of a graying ladies’ man whose heart attack lands him somewhere he never expected: in love with Keaton’s character, the mother of the young woman he’d been seeing. Keanu Reeves fills out the triangle as a thirtysomething doctor who winds up dating her as well, stealing a kiss of his own along the way. Amanda Peet plays Keaton’s daughter on screen.
Whatever discomfort the set brought, Keaton looked back on those Nicholson scenes with real fondness. “Kissing Jack in ‘Something’s Gotta Give’ was so powerful because I got to play a woman my age who was falling, seriously falling for the first time in her life,” she said in a later interview.
“I had to have that first kiss… where I grab him and I take him in my hands and I just kiss him hard.”
A beat later, she landed the joke. “Now can you imagine doing that with Jack Nicholson?” she said.
A Two-Decade Crush
Keaton was always candid and never one to downplay how much she admired her co-star. “I’ve had the biggest crush on him for 20 years,” she told the Daily Mail in 2004. “How can you not, even now? He’s irresistible.”
On a professional level, the warmth ran both ways. “The least of my problems [while doing this film] was making it believable that I was attracted to Diane Keaton,” Nicholson told Sunday Morning Herald in 2004.
Even so, Keaton brushed aside any suggestion that the on-screen chemistry might spill into real life.
“I don’t think it’s even a remote possibility,” she told the LA Times. “I can’t see Jack going out with someone in their 50s. Also, we are both too set in our ways. And he’s too huge, a myth, a legend. There’s no way.”
Nicholson saw it the same way, pointing to how mismatched the two of them were.
“Believe me, Diane and I are very different with one another than these two characters are on screen,” he said in the same Sunday Herald interview, noting that Keaton enjoyed ribbing him about how much she found him disgusting.
All of which set up the question fans kept circling back to: Nicholson or Reeves, who kissed better? Keaton didn’t hesitate. “Jack, without a doubt,” she said.
Keaton died in 2025 at 79. But be it old interviews or her Hollywood peers and close friends remembering her for who she was, she was definitely the one who lit up a room and never took herself too seriously.
