When Diane Keaton was a girl in Santa Ana, she began to collect photographs of Cary Grant, placing them in a cherished scrapbook. She had just seen The Philadelphia Story, starring Grant and Katharine Hepburn, for the first time. Grant was dazzlingly handsome, of course, but something else about him had leapt off the screen and captured her imagination.

Where Hepburn was gorgeous in a high-society way—all those gowns accentuating her trim waist, the dramatic shoulder-padded jackets, her fabulous mid-Atlantic accent—Keaton couldn’t take her eyes off Grant, who seemed to be having a better time than anyone else. “He wore things like white cardigan sweaters thrown ever so casually over his shoulders after a game of tennis, or a tuxedo with a white bow tie for afternoon tea, just for the fun of it,” Keaton recalled in one of her memoirs, Let’s Just Say It Wasn’t Pretty. “He wasn’t afraid of a polka-dot tie or handkerchief. He wore gray worsted wool suits with wide lapels, a waist button, a white shirt, and his collar up.” As she collated images of Grant, she also carefully recorded his fashion tips—the importance of a taut knot when tying a tie, the maxim that “clothes make the man,” and so on. To Keaton, Grant represented a formative encounter with the elusive quality that she would spend the rest of her life chasing: beauty.

Keaton, who died yesterday at age 79, was drawn to the stage, and then the screen, in an industry that remains obsessed with a shallower definition of beautiful. But from a young age, Keaton seemed to understand that actual beauty, the timeless kind, required a deg