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Right before her dog almost dies, my conversation with the acclaimed actress is disorderly. There is a lag on the line. Conversation stops and starts like a delivery truck. 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 smart. She aims to evade her own interview.

Tinseltown’s Most Self-Effacing Celebrity

Currently 77, the film industry’s most self-effacing star doesn’t do video calls. Neither does her role in the literary group films, the latest of which begins with her struggling to speak via her computer to close companions played by Jane Fonda, 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 suppose I mean: it’s not terrible or anything, but it’s a little odd.” We both talk, stop, interrupt each other again, a collision of chatter. Yes, phone is so much better, I say, and if there’s any more pleasant 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.” 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 hit, Keaton again plays Diane, a woman in her 70s, clumsy, eccentric, partial to men’s tailoring and broad 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 propose they change her character’s name, says Simms. “Something like ‘Leslie’. But it was already the second day of shooting.”

In the first film, the bereaved Diane connects with the actor. In the sequel, the four friends go to Italy for Fonda’s bridal shower. Cue big dinners, long montages (frocks, shops, unclad sculptures), endless double entendre and a surprisingly big part for Holby City’s Hugh Quarshie. And booze. So much booze.

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 and a red, but both are designed to be drunk over a tumbler of ice – not the recommended way of the really hardened wino. Nevertheless, she’s keen to run with the fiction: “Maybe then I’ll get a different kind of part. ‘They say Diane Keaton is a big consumer and you can really push her around. It simplifies things if she just stays quiet and drinks.’ Absurd!”

Film’s Theme

The first Book Club made eight times its cost by catering to overlooked over-60s who loved Sex and the City. Its story saw all four women variously shaken by reading Fifty Shades of Grey; in this installment, 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. “And then, sometimes, it’s quite great.”

Regarding her character’s big monologue about hanging on to youthful hopes? “I’m somewhat addicted to getting in my car and driving through the streets of LA,” she says – again, a bit off-topic. “A habit 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!”

Why are they so haunting? “Because existence is unsettling! 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 not that at all! It’s just things going up and down!”

I’m struggling slightly to visualize it. LA is not, after all, a walkable metropolis, unless you’re on your last legs. Anyone on the pavement is noticeable – Diane Keaton especially. Do people ever ask what she is up to? “No, because they aren’t interested. Generally, they’re just in a rush and they’re not looking.”

Did she ever sneak into one of the buildings? “No, I couldn’t. Goodness, I’d be arrested because they’re locked up! You want me to go to jail? That would be better for you. You could write: ‘I was talking to Diane Keaton but then I learned she got thrown in jail because she tried get inside old stores.’ Yeah! I imagine.”

Architecture Expert

In reality, Keaton is a true architecture expert. She’s made more money renovating properties for clients (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 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 doors and shared photos of them to Instagram.

“Oh, my God. Oh, I love doors. Uh-huh. 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 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 different project was not working out very well, but then, y’know, something crept in.

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

Which model does she have?

“Well, I have a [Mercedes] G-wagon. I’m spoiled. I’m fancy. I’m very upscale. It’s a black car. Yeah. It’s quite nice though. I like it.”

Is she a speeder? “No. What I prefer to do is observe, 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. God, be careful. Focus forward. Don’t begin gazing about when you’re driving.’ Yeah.”

Unique Persona

In case it’s not yet clear, speaking to Keaton is like listening to outtakes from the classic film delivered by 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 roll-neck, creates a stark difference with some of her Book Club co-stars. But most charming today is how indistinguishable she seems from her screen self.

“I believe the amount of overlap in the comparison of Diane as a individual and Diane as an performer,” says Holderman, “is unique. Her way of being in the world, her innate nature. She is relentlessly in the moment, as a human and as an actor.”

One morning, they visited the Sistine Chapel together. “To watch her observe the world is to comprehend who Diane Keaton is,” he says. “She is genuinely fascinated. She possesses all of that texture in her being.” Even in 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.” In some way, he says, she has not.

Keaton is generally described as modest. That somewhat underplays it. “Maybe she’d be upset for saying this,” says Holderman, cautiously. “She knows she’s a celebrity, but I don’t think she knows she’s a film icon. She is completely in the moment of her experience and existence that to ponder the larger … There is no time or space for it.”

Background

Keaton was born in an LA outskirt in 1946, the eldest of four kids for Dorothy and Jack Hall. Dad was an estate agent, her mother earned the local crown in the Mrs America contest for skilled housewives. Watching her crowned on stage evoked a blend of pride and jealousy in Keaton, who was eight at the time.

Dorothy was also a prolific – and unfulfilled – shutterbug, collage artist, ceramicist and diarist (85 volumes). Each of Keaton’s memoirs, as well as her essay collection, are as much about her parent as, for example, {starring|appearing