Goldie Hawn Emotionally Recalls Moment She Learned of Neighbor and Friend Diane Keaton’s Death

Goldie Hawn couldn’t believe the news when she first learned of Diane Keaton’s death.

Three decades after the two starred together in The First Wives Club, Hawn shared an emotional tribute to her longtime friend and neighbor at The Hollywood Reporter‘s Women in Entertainment Gala at the Beverly Hills Hotel on Wednesday.

“Diane lived right below me,” Hawn, 80, recalled. “My house was higher up, and I went down, and I said, you know, we can talk to each other. We would laugh, because we were so close, and, literally, I said, ‘Let me get a megaphone.’”

Goldie Hawn takes the stage and gives an emotional speech as we honor Diane Keaton at our #WOMENinENTERTAINMENT gala and says, "She was like lightening in a bottle. There wasn't anything she couldn't do." pic.twitter.com/QwbWmqqiHW

— The Hollywood Reporter (@THR) December 3, 2025

It came as a devastating blow then, when Hawn learned Keaton had died on Oct. 11 at age 79 due to pneumonia.

“I happened to learn [of Keaton’s death] when I was in my backyard, and I went over to my backyard, to my rose garden,” Hawn recalled. “I just looked down at her house, I said, ‘She can’t be gone. She just cannot be gone.’ No one like that should ever die. She just brought so much joy, so much life, so much exuberance. She was like lightning in a bottle.”

Looking back on working with Keaton in their iconic 1996 film with Bette Midler as well as the 2001 film Town and Country, Hawn praised her late friend as “an extraordinary human being” and a talented actress.

“She’s an amazing actress,” Hawn said through tears. “Look what she can do. Look at this natural aspect of how her body and mind work together and how she’s able to bring us joy and give us emotion and all of it. But look what else she did. She wrote books. She was interested in many things, not just acting and producing, but also directing.”

Later on, Hawn recalled a sentimental moment she shared with Keaton on the final day of filming for The First Wives Club.

“The last day when we made the movie, we had our feet up on the table and extolling how exciting it was that we won, and it was the end of the movie, and we were just waiting for lighting or whatever, and I said, ‘Diane, when we get old, why don’t we live together? And we can swim in the pool and drink wine, and it’ll all be great,’” Hawn remembered. “She went, ‘Yeah. Yeah.’”

“And that never happened,” added an emotional Keaton. “Well, I couldn’t leave Kurt [Russell] anyway.”