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Even before her dog nearly passes away, my conversation with the acclaimed actress is chaotic. There’s a delay on the line. Conversation stops and starts like a delivery truck. I’d emailed questions but she hasn’t read them. She desires to talk about doors. Each response comes stacked with caveats. It’s fun and stressful – and smart. She wants to evade her own interview.

Tinseltown’s Most Self-Effacing Celebrity

Currently 77, Hollywood’s most self-effacing star avoids video calls. Neither does her role in the Book Club films, the latest of which begins with her struggling to speak via her laptop to best friends played by the renowned actress, Mary Steenburgen and Candice Bergen.

“It’s always better when you avoid seeing me,” she says, “or see them, because it turns quite odd, you know? I guess I mean: it’s not that bad or anything, but it’s a little odd.” We both talk, stop, talk over 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. “I mean, don’t do much more.” Once again, I’m uncertain what she meant.

Book Club Sequel

Anyway, in Book Club: The Next Chapter, a follow-up to the 2018 success, Keaton again plays Diane, a woman in her 70s, bumbling, eccentric, fond of men’s tailoring and wide-brimmed hats. “We borrowed a bunch of ideas from her life,” says director Bill Holderman, who collaborated with his wife, Erin Simms, who speak to me over Zoom a few days later. Keaton did suggest they change her character’s name, says Simms. “Perhaps ‘Leslie’. But it was already the second day of shooting.”

In the first film, the widowed Diane connects with Andy García. In the follow-up, the four friends go to Italy for Fonda’s bridal shower. Expect big dinners, long sequences (frocks, shops, unclad sculptures), endless double entendre and a remarkably large part for Holby City’s Hugh Quarshie. And booze. So much booze.

I felt amazed by the drinking, I say; is it true to life? “Absolutely,” says Keaton gamely. “About six in the morning I’ll have a Lillet, or a chardonnay.” It’s now 11am; how many bottles down is she? “Goodness, maybe 25?”

Actually, Keaton has put her name to a white blend and a red, but both are designed to be drunk over a tumbler of ice – not the recommended way of the really hardened wino. Still, she’s eager to embrace the fiction: “Perhaps then I’ll get a new type of part. ‘They say Diane Keaton is a big consumer and you can easily influence her. It simplifies things if she just shuts up and drinks.’ Absurd!”

Film’s Theme

The first Book Club made 8x its budget by catering to undercatered over-60s who loved Sex and the City. Its plot saw all four women variously shaken by reading Fifty Shades of Grey; this time round, their homework is The Alchemist. It’s less integral to the plot. It touches about fatalism. “Not something I ramble on about,” says Keaton, “because it’s an aspect of it, of what we all face.” A gnomic pause. “Moreover, sometimes, it’s quite great.”

Regarding her character’s big monologue about hanging on to youthful hopes? “I’m sort of addicted to getting in my car and driving through the streets of LA,” she says – again, a bit off-topic. “Which most people avoid any more. And then getting out and snapping pictures of these stores and structures that have been just decimated. They’re no longer there!”

What makes them so eerie? “Because life is haunting! You hold an idea in your mind of what it is, or what it ought to be, or what it could be. But it’s not that at all! It’s just things fluctuating!”

I’m struggling slightly to visualize it. Los Angeles is not, ultimately, a pedestrian city, unless you’re on your last legs. Anybody on the pavement stands out – Diane Keaton especially. Does anyone ever ask what she’s doing? “No, because they don’t care. Generally, they’re just in a hurry and they’re not looking.”

Has she ever snuck inside one of the buildings? “No, I couldn’t. My God, I’d be arrested because they’re locked up! Are you hoping me to go to jail? That would be better for you. You can use this: ‘I was talking to Diane Keaton but then I heard she got incarcerated cause she tried get inside old stores.’ Yes! I imagine.”

Architecture Expert

In reality, Keaton is a true architecture specialist. She’s made more money flipping houses for patrons (who include Madonna) than she has making movies. One can discern a lot about a society through its city design, she says.: “I think they’re more evident in Italy. They’re more there with you. It’s entirely different from things here. It’s not as driven.” While filming, she saw a lot of entryways and posted photos of them to Instagram.

“Oh, my God. Oh, I love doors. Yes. In fact, I’m looking at them right now.” She likes 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 aspects that pretty much all of us experience. Such as: oh, I did that movie, but the other one was not working out very well, but then, you know, something crept in.

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

What type does she have?

“So, I have a [Mercedes] G-wagon. I’m a bitch. I’m luxurious. I’m very upscale. It’s black. Yeah. It’s quite nice though. I like it.”

Does she go fast? “No. What I prefer to do is observe, so I can have issues with that, when I neglect the road, I recall Mom used to tell me: ‘Diane, don’t do that. Heavens, watch out. Look ahead. Don’t begin looking around when you’re driving.’ Yeah.”

Distinct Character

If it’s not yet clear, talking with Keaton is like listening to unused clips from Annie Hall delivered by carrier pigeon. She’s a unique actor in so many ways – her aversion to plastic procedures, for instance, and hair dye, and anything more revealing than a turtleneck, creates a dramatic contrast with some of her film co-stars. But most charming today is how indistinguishable she seems from her screen self.

“I think the amount of overlap in the comparison of Diane as a person and Diane as an performer,” says Holderman, “is one-of-a-kind. How she exists in the world, how she’s wired. She is relentlessly in the moment, as a person and as an actor.”

One morning, they toured the Sistine Chapel together. “To watch her study the world is to comprehend who Diane Keaton is,” he says. “She is genuinely fascinated. She possesses all of that depth in her being.” Even in more ordinary, she’d still be jumping to examine light fittings. “Many people who have that artistic sensibility, as they get older, become conscious of themselves.” Somehow, he says, she has not.

Keaton is generally described as modest. That somewhat underplays it. “Maybe she’d kill me for saying this,” says Holderman, cautiously. “She knows she’s a celebrity, but I don’t believe she knows she’s a movie star. She’s just so in the moment of her experience and being that to ponder the larger … There is no time or space for it.”

Background

Keaton was delivered in an LA suburb in 1946, the eldest of four children for Dorothy and Jack Hall. Her father was an estate agent, her mother earned the local crown in the Mrs America contest for skilled 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 productive – and frustrated – photographer, collage artist, ceramicist and journal keeper (85 volumes). Each of Keaton’s autobiographies, as well as her writings, are as much about her parent as, say, {starring|appearing