Diane Keaton Explores Existence’s Quirks: From Furry Friends to Luxury Vehicles

Even before her canine companion almost dies, my conversation with the acclaimed actress is chaotic. There’s a delay on the line. Dialogue stops and starts like a milk float. I’d emailed questions but she didn’t review them. She wants to talk about doors. Every answer comes stacked with caveats. It’s fun and nerve-wracking – and intelligent. She aims to escape her own interview.

Tinseltown’s Extremely Modest Star

Currently 77, Hollywood’s most self-effacing star doesn’t do video calls. Nor does her role in the literary group films, the newest of which begins with her having difficulty to speak via her computer to close companions played by Jane Fonda, Mary Steenburgen and Candice Bergen.

“It’s always better when you avoid seeing 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 collision of chatter. Yes, 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 brief silence. “I think a little goes plenty,” she says. “I mean, don’t do much more.” Not for the last time, I’m uncertain what she meant.

Book Club Sequel

Anyway, in the sequel to Book Club, a follow-up to the 2018 hit, Keaton again plays Diane, a woman in her 70s, bumbling, quirky, partial to men’s tailoring and broad hats. “We stole 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. “Something like ‘Leslie’. But it was by then the second day of shooting.”

In the first film, the widowed Diane connects with Andy García. In the sequel, the four friends go to Italy for Fonda’s bridal shower. Cue big dinners, long montages (frocks, shops, unclad sculptures), endless innuendo and a remarkably large part for Holby City’s Hugh Quarshie. And booze. So much drink.

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

Actually, Keaton has put her name to a white and a red variety, but both are intended to be drunk over a tumbler of ice – not the recommended way of the truly seasoned wino. Nevertheless, she’s eager to run with the fiction: “Maybe then I’ll get a different kind of part. ‘I hear Diane Keaton is a big consumer and you can really push her around. It makes it much easier if she just shuts up and drinks.’ Absurd!”

Movie’s Focus

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 affected by reading Fifty Shades of Grey; in this installment, their homework is The Alchemist. It’s less integral to the plot. There’s some stuff about fatalism. “Nothing I ramble on about,” says Keaton, “because it’s an aspect of it, of what we all deal with.” A gnomic pause. “And then, sometimes, it’s kind of great.”

What about her character’s big speech about hanging on to youthful hopes? “I’m somewhat addicted to getting in my car and cruising the streets of LA,” she says – once more, a bit off-topic. “Which most people avoid any more. And then exiting and photographing these stores and structures 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 might become. But it’s far from it! It’s just things going up and down!”

I find it hard slightly to picture it. LA is not, after all, a pedestrian city, unless you’re on your uppers. Anyone on the pavement is noticeable – Diane Keaton particularly. Do people ever ask what she is up to? “No, because they don’t care. For the most part, they’re just in a rush and they’re not looking.”

Did she ever sneak into one of the buildings? “No, I couldn’t. My God, 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 was talking to Diane Keaton but then I learned she got thrown in jail because she tried enter old stores.’ Yes! I bet.”

Building Aficionado

Actually, Keaton is a true architecture expert. She has earned more money flipping houses for patrons (who include Madonna) than she has making movies. One can discern a lot about a community through its urban planning, she says.: “I think they’re more present in Italy. They’re 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 entryways and posted photos of them to Instagram.

“Goodness gracious. 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 empty? It prompts reflection about all the aspects that pretty much all of us go through. Such as: oh, I did that movie, but the other one was not succeeding very well, but then, you know, something snuck in.

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

Which model does she have?

“Well, I have a [Mercedes] G-wagon. I’m spoiled. I’m fancy. I’m really fancy. It’s a black car. Yeah. It’s pretty good though. I enjoy it.”

Does she go fast? “No. What I prefer to do is observe, so I can get in trouble with that, when I’m not watching the road, I recall Mom used to tell me: ‘Diane, don’t do that. Heavens, be careful. Focus forward. Don’t begin gazing about 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 singular actor in so many ways – her aversion to cosmetic surgery, for instance, and hair dye, and anything more revealing than a roll-neck, makes for a dramatic contrast with some of her Book Club co-stars. But most charming today is how indistinguishable she seems from her on-screen persona.

“I think the amount of overlap in the comparison of Diane as a individual and Diane as an performer,” says Holderman, “is one-of-a-kind. Her way of being in the world, how she’s wired. She is constantly in the moment, as a human and as an actor.”

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

Keaton is usually described as self-deprecating. That sort of underplays it. “Maybe she’d be upset for saying this,” says Holderman, carefully. “She knows she’s a movie star, but I don’t believe she knows she’s a movie star. She is completely in the moment of her experience and being that to reflect on the larger … There’s just no time or space for it.”

Early Life

Keaton was born in an LA outskirt in 1946, the first of four kids for Dorothy and Jack Hall. Her father was an estate agent, her mother earned the regional title in the Mrs America contest for skilled housewives. Seeing her crowned on stage evoked a blend of satisfaction and jealousy in Keaton, who was eight at the time.

Dorothy was also a productive – and frustrated – photographer, collage artist, ceramicist and diarist (85 volumes). Both of Keaton’s autobiographies, as well as her writings, are as much about her parent as, say, {starring|appearing