🔗 Share this article

Right before her dog almost dies, my call with the acclaimed actress is disorderly. There is a lag on the line. Conversation halts and resumes like a milk float. I had sent questions but she hasn’t read them. She desires to talk about entryways. Every answer comes filled with qualifications. It’s enjoyable and nerve-wracking – and smart. She aims to evade her own interview.

Tinseltown’s Most Self-Effacing Star

Now 77, Hollywood’s most humble star avoids video calls. Neither does her role in the literary group films, the latest of which begins with her having difficulty to speak via her laptop to close companions played by the renowned actress, Mary Steenburgen and Candice Bergen.

“It’s always better when you don’t see me,” she says, “or see them, because it becomes so strange, you know? I suppose I mean: it’s not that bad or anything, but it’s a bit unusual.” We converse, stop, interrupt each other again, a car crash of chatter. Indeed, phone is so much better, I say, and if there’s any nicer sound than the star laughing at your joke, I’d like to hear it.

A pause. “I think a little goes plenty,” she says. “That is, don’t do much more.” Not for the last time, I’m uncertain what she meant.

Book Club Sequel

In any case, in the sequel to Book Club, a follow-up to the 2018 hit, Keaton again plays Diane, a woman in her 70s, clumsy, eccentric, partial to men’s tailoring and wide-brimmed hats. “We borrowed a bunch of ideas from her life,” says director Bill Holderman, who co-wrote with his wife, Erin Simms, who talk with me over Zoom a few days later. Keaton did suggest they change her character’s name, says Simms. “Something like ‘Leslie’. But it was already the second day of shooting.”

In the first film, the widowed Diane connects with the actor. In the sequel, the four companions go to Italy for Fonda’s bachelorette party. Expect big dinners, long sequences (frocks, shops, unclad sculptures), endless innuendo and a surprisingly big part for Holby City’s Hugh Quarshie. And booze. So much booze.

I was impressed by the drinking, I say; is it true to life? “Oh yeah,” says Keaton enthusiastically. “Around 6 in the morning I’ll have a Lillet, or a chardonnay.” It’s now 11am; how many glasses consumed is she? “Goodness, maybe 25?”

In fact, Keaton has launched a white blend and a red, but both are intended to be drunk over a tumbler of ice – not the recommended way of the truly seasoned wino. Still, she’s keen to run with the fiction: “Perhaps then I’ll get a new type of part. ‘I hear Diane Keaton is a big consumer and you can easily influence her. It makes it much easier if she just stays quiet and drinks.’ Absurd!”

Film’s Theme

The first Book Club made eight times its budget by serving overlooked over-60s who adored Sex and the City. Its plot saw all four women variously affected by reading Fifty Shades of Grey; this time round, their homework is The Alchemist. It plays a smaller role to the plot. There’s some stuff about fatalism. “Nothing I dwell about,” says Keaton, “because it’s all part of it, of what we all face.” A cryptic silence. “And then, sometimes, it’s kind of great.”

What about her character’s big speech about holding onto youthful hopes? “I’m sort of addicted to getting in my car and cruising the streets of LA,” she says – again, a bit off-topic. “A habit most people don’t do any more. And then exiting and snapping pictures of these stores and buildings that have been just decimated. They aren’t there!”

Why are they so haunting? “Because life is haunting! You have an idea in your mind of what it is, or what it ought to be, or what it could be. But it’s far from it! It’s just things fluctuating!”

I’m struggling slightly to picture it. LA is not, ultimately, a walkable metropolis, unless you’re on your last legs. Anybody on the pavement stands out – Diane Keaton particularly. Do people ever ask what she is up to? “No, because they don’t care. Generally, they’re just in a rush and they’re not looking.”

Has she ever sneak into one of the buildings? “Oh, I can’t. My God, I’d be thrown in jail because they’re secured! Are you hoping me to go to jail? That’d be better for you. You could write: ‘I was talking to Diane Keaton but then I learned she got thrown in jail because she tried get inside old stores.’ Yes! I bet.”

Architecture Expert

In reality, Keaton is quite the architecture expert. She’s made more money flipping houses for patrons (who include Madonna) than she has making movies. You can tell a lot about a community through its urban planning, she says.: “I believe they’re more present in Italy. They feel more there with you. It’s just so different from things here. It’s not as driven.” During the shoot, she saw a lot of doors and shared photos of them to Instagram.

“Goodness gracious. Oh, I love doors. Yes. Actually, I’m looking at them right now.” She enjoys to imagine the comings and goings, “the individuals who lived there or what they offered or why is it vacant? It makes you think about all the facets that more or less all of us go through. Such as: oh, I did that movie, but the different project was not succeeding very well, but then, you know, something snuck in.

“It’s truly interesting that we’re living, that we’re here, and that the majority who are fortunate have cars, which take you all over the place. I love my car.”

What type does she have?

“Well, I have a [Mercedes] G-wagon. I’m a bitch. I’m fancy. I’m really fancy. It’s black. Yeah. It’s quite nice though. I like it.”

Does she go fast? “No. What I prefer to do is look, so I can get in trouble with that, when I’m not watching the road, I remember Mom used to tell me: ‘Diane, don’t do that. God, watch out. Focus forward. Don’t start looking around when you’re driving.’ Yes.”

Distinct Character

If it’s not yet clear, talking with Keaton is like hearing unused clips from Annie Hall delivered by carrier pigeon. She’s a singular actor in so many ways – her aversion to plastic procedures, for instance, and coloring, and anything more revealing than a roll-neck, makes for a stark difference with some of her film co-stars. But most charming today is how indistinguishable she seems from her on-screen persona.

“I believe the amount of similarity in the Venn diagram of Diane as a individual and Diane as an performer,” says Holderman, “is one-of-a-kind. How she exists in the world, her innate nature. She is relentlessly in the moment, as a person and as an artist.”

One morning, they toured the Sistine Chapel together. “To observe her study the world is to understand who Diane Keaton is,” he says. “She is truly fascinated. She has all of that depth in her soul.” Even in more ordinary, she’d still be hopping up to examine light fittings. “A lot of people who have that creative instinct, as they get older, become self-aware.” In some way, he says, she has not.

Keaton is usually described as modest. That sort of downplays it. “Perhaps she’d kill me for saying this,” says Holderman, carefully. “She knows she’s a celebrity, but I don’t think she knows she’s a movie star. She’s just so in the moment of her experience and existence that to ponder the larger … There’s just no time or space for it.”

Background

Keaton was born in an LA outskirt in 1946, the first of four kids for Dorothy and Jack Hall. Dad was an estate agent, her mother earned the local crown in the Mrs America competition for accomplished housewives. Seeing her crowned on stage evoked a blend of pride and envy in Keaton, who was eight at the time.

Dorothy was also a prolific – and unfulfilled – shutterbug, collagist, potter and journal keeper (85 volumes). Both of Keaton’s memoirs, as well as her writings, are as much about her parent as, say, {starring|appearing