Goldie Hawn couldn’t hold back tears while recalling how she found out about First Wives Club costar Diane Keaton’s death.
“I happened to learn when I was in my backyard, and I went over to my backyard to my rose garden,” Hawn, 80, said onstage while speaking at The Hollywood Reporter’s Women in Entertainment Gala on Wednesday, December 3, per People. “I just looked down. 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.”
Hawn went on to call her longtime friend an “extraordinary human being” and “amazing actress,” praising the Oscar-winner for all she could “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,” she continued. “But look what else she did. She wrote books. She was interested in many things, not just acting and producing, but also directing.”
According to the outlet, Hawn then proceeded to explain that it was impossible to accurately describe Keaton in something like an Instagram post or speech, telling the audience, “It’s like trying to explain what a taste of a tangerine tastes like.”
Keaton and Hawn became close while filming their 1996 film The First Wives Club alongside Bette Midler. The trio played Elise Elliot (Hawn), Annie Paradis (Keaton) and Brenda Cushman (Midler). The movie also starred Maggie Smith, Sarah Jessica Parker, Stockard Channing, Dan Hedaya, Victor Garber, Stephen Collins, Elizabeth Berkly and Marcia Gay Harden.
While speaking at the Women in Entertainment Gala on Wednesday, Hawn reflected on shooting the project with Keaton, calling her a “tenacious” star with a fashion sense that was just as memorable and fantastic as her personality.
“She’s an incredibly hard worker. At the same time, she would come into the makeup trailer, which is my favorite thing, and she had a different hat on every day,” she added.
News of Keaton’s death broke on October 11, with a spokesperson telling People the actress died at her home in California. They later confirmed to the outlet that the actress died of pneumonia. She was 79.
Just hours after her passing, Hawn took to social media to share a heartfelt message for Keaton.
“Diane, we aren’t ready to lose you. How do we say goodbye? What words can come to mind when your heart is broken? You never liked praise, so humble, but now you can’t tell me to ‘shut up’ honey,” the Overboard star wrote via Instagram alongside a photo of Keaton smiling. “We agreed to grow old together, and one day, maybe live together with all our girlfriends. Well, we never got to live together, but we did grow older together. Who knows … maybe in the next life. Shine your fairy dust up there, girlfriend. I’m going to miss the hell out of you.”
Midler, 79, also shared her condolences via Instagram, writing in a separate post, “The brilliant, beautiful, extraordinary Diane Keaton has died. I cannot tell you how unbearably sad this makes me. She was hilarious, a complete original, and completely without guile, or any of the competitiveness one would have expected from such a star. What you saw was who she was … oh, la, lala!”
Despite the trio instantly bonding — and First Wives Club being a mega blockbuster success turned beloved classic over the decades — a sequel was never made. In 2015, Hawn told Harvard Business Review that the women turned down a second film after being offered a lowball salary.
“We were all women of a certain age, and everyone took a cut in salary to do it so the studio could make what it needed,” she revealed. “We all took a smaller back end than usual and a much smaller front end. And we ended up doing incredibly well. The movie was hugely successful. It made a lot of money. We were on the cover of Time magazine.”
She continued: “But two years later, when the studio came back with a sequel, they wanted to offer us exactly the same deal. We went back to ground zero. Had three men come in there, they would have upped their salaries without even thinking about it. But the fear of women’s movies is embedded in the culture.”