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Even before her canine companion almost dies, my call with Diane Keaton is disorderly. There is a lag on the line. Conversation halts and resumes like a delivery truck. I’d emailed questions but she didn’t review them. She wants to talk about doors. Every answer comes filled with caveats. It’s fun and nerve-wracking – and intelligent. She aims to escape her own interview.

Tinseltown’s Extremely Modest Celebrity

Now 77, the film industry’s most humble star avoids video calls. Nor does her character in the Book Club films, the latest of which starts with her having difficulty to speak via her laptop to best friends played by the renowned actress, Mary Steenburgen and Candice Bergen.

“It’s preferable 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 both talk, stop, talk over each other again, a collision 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 brief silence. “I think a little goes plenty,” she says. “That is, don’t do much more.” Not for the last time, I’m not exactly sure what she meant.

Book Club Sequel

In any case, in the sequel to Book Club, a sequel to the 2018 hit, Keaton once again plays Diane, a woman in her 70s, bumbling, eccentric, fond of 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 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 by then the second day of shooting.”

In the original movie, the widowed Diane hooks up with the actor. In the sequel, the four friends go to Italy for Fonda’s bridal shower. Expect big dinners, long montages (frocks, shops, unclad sculptures), endless innuendo and a remarkably large part for the show’s Hugh Quarshie. And booze. So much drink.

I felt amazed by the drinking, I say; is it true to life? “Absolutely,” says Keaton gamely. “Around 6 in the morning I’ll have a Lillet, or a chardonnay.” Currently 11am; how many glasses consumed is she? “Oh God, 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 recommended way of the truly seasoned wino. Still, she’s eager 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 shuts up and drinks.’ Ridiculous!”

Film’s Theme

The first Book Club made 8x its cost by serving undercatered over-60s who loved Sex and the City. Its story 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 dwell 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.”

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 – once more, a bit tangentially. “Which most people don’t do any more. And then getting out and photographing these stores and structures that have been just decimated. They aren’t there!”

What makes them so haunting? “Because life is unsettling! You have 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, after all, a pedestrian city, unless you’re on your last legs. 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.”

Has she ever snuck inside one of the buildings? “Oh, I can’t. Goodness, I’d be arrested because they’re secured! Are you hoping me to go to jail? That’d be better for you. You could write: ‘I spoke to Diane Keaton but then I learned she got incarcerated cause she tried get inside old stores.’ Yeah! I imagine.”

Architecture Expert

In reality, Keaton is a true architecture expert. She has earned more money renovating properties for patrons (who include Madonna) than she has making movies. One can discern 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 just so different from things here. It’s less frantic.” During the shoot, she saw a lot of entryways and shared photos of them to Instagram.

“Oh, my God. Oh, I love doors. Yes. In fact, I’m gazing at them right now.” She likes to imagine the comings and goings, “the individuals who lived there or what they sold or why is it empty? It prompts reflection about all the aspects that pretty much all of us go through. Like: oh, I did that movie, but the different project was not succeeding very well, but then, y’know, something snuck in.

“It’s just so interesting that we’re living, that we’re here, and that most of us who are lucky have cars, which take you all over the place. I love my car.”

What type does she have?

“So, I have a [Mercedes] G-wagon. I’m spoiled. I’m fancy. I’m really fancy. It’s a black car. Yes. It’s quite nice though. I enjoy it.”

Is she a speeder? “No. What I like 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. Heavens, be careful. Focus forward. Don’t begin gazing about when you’re driving.’ Yeah.”

Unique Persona

If it’s not yet clear, talking with Keaton is like listening to outtakes from the classic film sent via carrier pigeon. She’s a unique actor in so many ways – her aversion to plastic procedures, for instance, and coloring, and anything more revealing than a turtleneck, makes for a stark difference with some of her film co-stars. But most disarming today is how indistinguishable she seems from her screen self.

“I believe the degree of similarity 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 remains relentlessly in the moment, as a person 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 remains genuinely fascinated. She possesses all of that depth in her being.” Even somewhere more mundane, she’d still be jumping to examine fixtures. “Many people who have that creative instinct, as they get older, become conscious of themselves.” In some way, he says, she hasn’t.

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

Early Life

Keaton was born in an LA suburb in 1946, the eldest of four kids for Dorothy and Jack Hall. Dad was an real estate broker, her mother earned the regional title in the Mrs America competition for accomplished housewives. Watching her crowned on stage prompted a blend of satisfaction and envy in Keaton, who was eight at the time.

Dorothy was also a prolific – and unfulfilled – photographer, collagist, potter and journal keeper (85 volumes). Each of Keaton’s memoirs, as well as her essay collection, are as much about her parent as, for example, {starring|appearing