The American Horror Story actress posted a throwback photo with Keaton and her daughter Dexter White, saying laughing together is what she remembers most.
Sarah Paulson posted a throwback photo on Instagram Sunday, marking one year since Diane Keaton died. The picture shows the two of them bundled up in winter coats, cracking up together, with Keaton's daughter Dexter White standing alongside them. Keaton has her hand thrown in the air mid-laugh. Paulson is doubled over beside her.
The caption was short. "One year. Impossible," Paulson wrote, according to TMZ. "Laughing with you will always be what I remember most. I love you."
Keaton died on October 11, 2025, at 79. Her family later confirmed pneumonia as the cause, per TMZ's reporting at the time.
Paulson and Keaton went back more than two decades, to the 1999 film The Other Sister, where they played sisters. That working relationship turned into the kind of friendship that outlasts a single project. TMZ reported that in the days right after Keaton's death, Paulson was visibly emotional talking about her, calling her a dear friend and saying she was, if anything, more remarkable as a person than she was as an actress on screen. That's saying something, given the career: four decades of work, an Oscar for Annie Hall, a run of films that shaped how an entire generation of actresses thought about comic timing.
There's been no shortage of tributes to Keaton over the past year, from people who worked with her across different decades of her career. What stands out about Paulson's post is how small it keeps things. No career retrospective, no list of favourite films. Just a photo of three people laughing in the cold, and a caption that doesn't try to do more than it needs to.
It also puts a name to someone who hadn't been widely discussed in the coverage around Keaton's death: Dexter White, her daughter. Keaton adopted Dexter and a son, Duke, as a single parent in the 1990s and famously kept her family life largely out of the press even as her film career stayed in the spotlight. Seeing Dexter in a candid, unposed photo like this one is rare on its own.
A year on, the people closest to Keaton are still working out what to do with the anniversary. For Paulson, at least for now, that's a photo and four sentences. No grand statement, no career summary. Just the memory of one good day, and the fact that it's suddenly been a whole year since she could pick up the phone and share another one.
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