Though the role of Kay Adams is crucial to the story, she is more of a catalyst than a central figure in the first Godfather. Yet Diane Keaton’s memories of the film center on Al Pacino and a huge wig: “It was [makeup artist] Dick Smith’s idea to stick a 10-pound blond wig on my head, where it sat throughout the entire movie like a ton of bricks.” The wig may have peeved her, but Keaton loved working with Pacino. “For me, the Godfathers, all three of them, were about one thing – Al,” she said.
Kay was the outsider, an elegant Wasp in a world of Italian families and the Mafia. In her memoir Then Again, Keaton wrote, “As for the role of Kay? What epitomized it? The picture of a woman standing in a hallway waiting for permission to see her husband.”