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Right before her canine companion nearly passes away, my conversation with the acclaimed actress is chaotic. There’s a delay on the line. Conversation halts and resumes like a delivery truck. I’d emailed questions but she hasn’t read them. She wants to talk about doors. Every answer comes stacked with caveats. It’s fun and nerve-wracking – and intelligent. She wants to escape her own interview.

Tinseltown’s Most Self-Effacing Celebrity

Currently 77, the film industry’s most humble star avoids video calls. Neither does her role in the Book Club films, the latest of which starts 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 guess I mean: it’s not that bad or anything, but it’s a bit unusual.” We both talk, stop, interrupt each other again, a car crash of chatter. Yes, 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 brief silence. “I believe 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 Book Club: The Next Chapter, a follow-up to the 2018 hit, Keaton again plays Diane, a woman in her 70s, bumbling, eccentric, partial to men’s tailoring and broad hats. “We stole 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 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 widowed Diane connects with the actor. In the sequel, the four companions go to Italy for Fonda’s bridal shower. Cue big dinners, long sequences (frocks, shops, naked statues), endless double entendre and a remarkably large part for Holby City’s Hugh Quarshie. And alcohol. 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 drink a Lillet, or a chardonnay.” It’s now 11am; how many glasses consumed is she? “Goodness, maybe 25?”

In fact, Keaton has put her name to a white blend and a red, but both are intended to be drunk over a glass of ice – not the serving suggestion of the truly seasoned wino. Nevertheless, she’s keen to embrace the fiction: “Maybe then I’ll get a different kind of part. ‘I hear 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.’ Ridiculous!”

Movie’s Focus

The first Book Club made eight times its budget by serving overlooked over-60s who loved Sex and the City. Its plot saw all four women differently shaken by reading Fifty Shades of Grey; this time round, their homework is The Alchemist. It plays a smaller role to the plot. It touches about fatalism. “Nothing 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 kind of great.”

What about her character’s big monologue about hanging on to youthful hopes? “I’m somewhat addicted to getting in my car and cruising the streets of LA,” she says – again, a bit off-topic. “Which most people avoid any more. And then exiting and snapping pictures of these shops and buildings 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 should be, or what it could be. But it’s far from it! It’s just things going up and down!”

I find it hard slightly to picture it. Los Angeles is not, after all, a pedestrian city, unless you’re on your uppers. Anybody on the pavement stands out – the actress especially. Does anyone ever ask what she is up to? “No, because they aren’t interested. For the most part, they’re just in a hurry and they’re not looking.”

Did she ever snuck inside one of the buildings? “Oh, I can’t. My God, I’d be arrested because they’re locked up! You want 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.”

Building Aficionado

Actually, Keaton is quite the architecture specialist. She’s made more money flipping houses for clients (who include Madonna) than she has making movies. One can discern a lot about a community through its city design, she says.: “I think they’re more evident 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.

“Oh, my God. Oh, I love doors. Yes. Actually, I’m looking at them right now.” She likes to imagine the comings and goings, “the people who lived there or what they offered or why is it empty? It prompts reflection about all the aspects that more or less all of us experience. Like: oh, I did that movie, but the different project was not working out very well, but then, you know, something crept in.

“It’s just so interesting that we’re alive, 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?

“Well, I have a [Mercedes] G-wagon. I’m a bitch. I’m fancy. I’m very upscale. It’s a black car. Yes. It’s pretty good 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 neglect the road, I remember Mom used to tell me: ‘Diane, avoid that. God, watch out. Look ahead. Don’t start gazing about when you’re driving.’ Yes.”

Distinct Character

If it’s not yet clear, talking with Keaton is like hearing outtakes from the classic film sent via carrier pigeon. She’s a singular actor in so many ways – her aversion to cosmetic surgery, for instance, and coloring, and anything more exposing than a roll-neck, makes for a stark difference 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 degree of overlap in the comparison of Diane as a individual and Diane as an performer,” says Holderman, “is unique. How she exists in the world, her innate nature. She is relentlessly in the moment, as a human and as an artist.”

On a particular day, they toured the Sistine Chapel together. “To observe her observe the world is to understand who Diane Keaton is,” he says. “She is truly fascinated. She possesses all of that texture in her being.” Even somewhere more ordinary, she’d still be jumping to examine light fittings. “Many people who have that creative instinct, as they get older, become conscious of themselves.” Somehow, he says, she has not.

Keaton is generally described as modest. That somewhat downplays 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 film icon. 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.”

Background

Keaton was born in an LA suburb in 1946, the eldest of four kids for Dorothy and Jack Hall. Her father was an estate agent, her mother won the regional title in the Mrs America competition for accomplished housewives. Seeing her honored on stage evoked a mix of satisfaction and envy in Keaton, who was eight at the time.

Dorothy was also a prolific – and frustrated – photographer, collagist, ceramicist and diarist (85 volumes). Both of Keaton’s memoirs, as well as her writings, are as much about her mother as, say, {starring|appearing