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Right before her canine companion almost dies, my call with the acclaimed actress is disorderly. There’s a delay on the line. Conversation halts and resumes like a milk float. I had sent questions but she hasn’t read them. She wants to talk about entryways. Every answer comes filled with qualifications. It’s fun and stressful – and intelligent. She wants to evade her own interview.

Tinseltown’s Extremely Modest Celebrity

Now 77, the film industry’s most self-effacing star doesn’t do video calls. Nor does her character in the literary group films, the newest of which begins with her having difficulty to speak via her computer to best friends 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 guess I mean: it’s not that bad or anything, but it’s a little odd.” 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 more pleasant sound than Diane Keaton 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 not exactly sure what she meant.

Book Club Sequel

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

In the original movie, the bereaved Diane connects with the actor. In the follow-up, the four companions go to Italy for Fonda’s bachelorette party. Cue 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 drink.

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

In fact, Keaton has put her name to a white and a red, but both are intended to be drunk over a tumbler of ice – not the serving suggestion of the really hardened wino. Nevertheless, she’s keen to run with the fiction: “Perhaps then I’ll get a different kind of part. ‘They say Diane Keaton is a heavy drinker and you can really push her around. It makes it much easier if she just stays quiet and drinks.’ Absurd!”

Movie’s Focus

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

Regarding her character’s big speech about hanging on to youthful hopes? “I’m sort of addicted to getting in my car and cruising the streets of LA,” she says – again, a bit tangentially. “Which most people avoid any more. And then getting out and snapping pictures of these shops and buildings that have been just decimated. They aren’t there!”

Why are they so haunting? “Because life is unsettling! You hold an idea in your mind of what it is, or what it should be, or what it might become. But it’s far from it! It’s just things fluctuating!”

I find it hard slightly to visualize it. Los Angeles is not, ultimately, a pedestrian city, unless you’re on your uppers. Anybody on the pavement stands out – Diane Keaton especially. Does anyone ever ask what she’s doing? “No, because they aren’t interested. Generally, they’re just in a rush and they’re not looking.”

Did she ever snuck inside one of the buildings? “No, I couldn’t. Goodness, I’d be thrown in jail because they’re locked up! You want me to go to jail? That’d be better for you. You can use this: ‘I spoke to Diane Keaton but then I heard she got incarcerated cause she tried enter old stores.’ Yeah! I imagine.”

Building Aficionado

In reality, Keaton is quite the architecture specialist. She’s made more money renovating properties for patrons (who include Madonna) than she has making movies. You can tell a lot about a society through its urban planning, she says.: “I think they’re more present in Italy. They’re more there with you. It’s entirely different from things here. It’s less frantic.” During the shoot, she saw a lot of doors and posted photos of them to Instagram.

“Goodness gracious. I adore doors. Uh-huh. In fact, I’m looking at them right now.” She enjoys to imagine the exits and entrances, “the people who lived there or what they sold or why is it vacant? It makes you think about all the facets that pretty much all of us go through. Like: oh, I did that movie, but the different project was not working out very well, but then, y’know, something snuck in.

“It’s just so interesting that we’re alive, that we’re here, and that most of us who are fortunate have cars, which transport 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 luxurious. I’m really fancy. It’s a black car. Yes. It’s quite nice though. I enjoy it.”

Does she go fast? “No. What I like to do is look, so I can get in trouble with that, when I neglect the road, I recall Mom used to tell me: ‘Diane, don’t do that. Heavens, be careful. Look ahead. Don’t begin looking around when you’re driving.’ Yes.”

Unique Persona

If it’s not yet clear, speaking to Keaton is like hearing unused clips from Annie Hall delivered by carrier pigeon. She’s a unique actor in so many ways – her dislike to cosmetic surgery, for instance, and hair dye, and anything more exposing 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 screen self.

“I believe the degree of similarity in the comparison of Diane as a individual and Diane as an actor,” says Holderman, “is one-of-a-kind. Her way of being in the world, her innate nature. She remains relentlessly in the moment, as a person and as an artist.”

One morning, they toured the Sistine Chapel together. “To watch her observe the world is to understand who Diane Keaton is,” he says. “She remains truly fascinated. She has all of that texture in her soul.” Even somewhere more ordinary, she’d still be hopping up to examine fixtures. “Many people who have that creative instinct, as they get older, become self-aware.” In some way, he says, she hasn’t.

Keaton is generally described as self-deprecating. That sort of downplays it. “Perhaps she’d be upset for saying this,” says Holderman, cautiously. “She is aware she’s a celebrity, but I don’t think she knows she’s a film icon. 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 born in an LA outskirt in 1946, the first of four children for Dorothy and Jack Hall. Her father was an estate agent, her mother won 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 – photographer, collagist, potter and diarist (85 volumes). Both of Keaton’s autobiographies, as well as her essay collection, are as much about her parent as, for example, {starring|appearing