In March 2025, Diane Keaton decided to put her Sullivan Valley mansion up for sale, located between Brentwood and Pacific Palisades, for $29 million (¤25 million), surprising those closest to her. The actress had invested eight years of her life to make her dream come true, as she was an avid admirer of architecture.
In fact, she was so proud of her project that she published the book The House that Pinterest Built. "After fifteen years of buying and selling, I was ready to build a house from scratch," she wrote in the mentioned volume.
When the actress expressed her intention to sell the over 750-square-meter rustic and industrially designed mansion, characterized by 75,000 bricks covering both the exterior and interior of the property, her friends were taken aback. However, no one could have foreseen such a tragic outcome as her passing on October 11 at the age of 79.
According to the Daily Mail, the muse of Woody Allen (89) left behind a fortune of $100 million (¤86 million), which as other English-speaking media outlets indicate, will go to her two adopted children, Dexter, who will turn 30 in December and has been married to Jordan White since 2021, and Duke, 25 years old. From the beginning, Diane was determined to shield the children from the Hollywood spotlight. She adopted them when she was over 50 years old.
In her lifetime, Diane Keaton was not one of the highest-paid actresses, but she was known for breaking the fourth wall. According to the official movie portal IMSb, her first significant salary was $35,000 for The Godfather (1972), which increased to $250,000 in 1977 for Annie Hall and to $2 million for Reds (1981), where she starred alongside her then-boyfriend Warren Beatty (88).
Her vast fortune was a combination of her earnings as an actress and director, as well as her wise real estate investments that yielded significant profits through buying and selling after making necessary renovations. For instance, in 2018, she bought a house in Tucson for $1.5 million which she sold two years later for $2.6 million. In 2012, she acquired a property in Pacific Palisades for $5.6 million from which she made a $1.3 million profit four years later, and in 2004, she purchased another residence in Laguna Beach for $7.5 million which she sold in 2006 for $12.75 million.
Currently, the queens of this type of business are Ellen DeGeneres (67) and her wife Portia de Rossi (52), who have earned hundreds of millions of dollars in recent years.
Diane Keaton's unexpected passing has saddened the industry like never before. One of her close friends, singer and composer Carole Bayer Sager (81), saw her for the last time two or three weeks ago and told People magazine, "she was very thin, had lost a lot of weight," and recalled that after the devastating January fire in California, "she had to go to Palm Springs because her house had suffered damage inside and they had to clean everything. She was there for a while, and when she returned, I was shocked by how much weight she had lost."
Another source close to the family also told People, "her decline was very sudden, which was heartbreaking for all her loved ones," and that "even lifelong friends were not fully aware of what was happening."
Additionally, some neighbors were surprised by the change in habits of one of the stars of The Godfather as she had stopped walking her pet, a Golden Retriever named Reggie, who was featured in her last Instagram post for National Pet Day.
The same source mentioned that Diane "was always very friendly, funny, and talkative. She talked to her dog as if it were a person. She was eccentric and had this aura of old-school Hollywood. She was very, very special."