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Right before her dog almost dies, my call with Diane Keaton is disorderly. There is a lag on the line. Dialogue halts and resumes like a milk float. I’d emailed questions but she hasn’t read them. She wants to talk about doors. Every answer comes filled with qualifications. It’s enjoyable and stressful – and intelligent. She aims to escape her own interview.

Tinseltown’s Extremely Modest Celebrity

Now 77, the film industry’s most self-effacing star avoids video calls. Neither does her character in the Book Club films, the newest of which starts with her having difficulty to speak via her computer to best friends played by the renowned actress, Mary Steenburgen and Candice Bergen.

“It’s preferable 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 converse, stop, talk over 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.

Follow-Up Film

Anyway, in the sequel to Book Club, a follow-up to the 2018 success, 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 filmmaker Bill Holderman, who collaborated with his wife, Erin Simms, who speak to me over Zoom a few days later. Keaton did suggest they change her character’s name, says Simms. “Something like ‘Leslie’. But it was already the second day of shooting.”

In the original movie, the bereaved Diane hooks up with Andy García. In the follow-up, the four friends go to Italy for Fonda’s bachelorette party. Expect big dinners, long montages (frocks, shops, naked statues), endless double entendre and a surprisingly big part for the show’s Hugh Quarshie. And alcohol. So much booze.

I felt amazed by the drinking, I say; is it true to life? “Absolutely,” says Keaton gamely. “Around 6 in the morning I’ll drink a Lillet, or a chardonnay.” It’s now 11am; how many bottles down is she? “Goodness, maybe 25?”

Actually, Keaton has put her name to a white blend and a red, but both are intended to be drunk over a tumbler of ice – not the recommended way of the really hardened wino. Nevertheless, she’s eager to embrace the fiction: “Perhaps 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 stays quiet and drinks.’ Ridiculous!”

Movie’s Focus

The original Book Club made eight times its cost by catering to undercatered over-60s who loved Sex and the City. Its plot 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. “Nothing I ramble on about,” says Keaton, “because it’s an aspect of it, of what we all face.” A cryptic silence. “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. “A habit most people avoid any more. And then getting out and snapping pictures of these shops and buildings that have been largely destroyed. They aren’t there!”

What makes them so haunting? “Because existence 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 going up and down!”

I’m struggling slightly to visualize it. Los Angeles is not, after all, a walkable metropolis, unless you’re on your last legs. Anyone on the pavement stands out – Diane Keaton 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. Goodness, I’d be arrested because they’re locked up! Are you hoping me to go to jail? That’d be better for you. You can use this: ‘I spoke to Diane Keaton but then I learned she got incarcerated because she tried get inside old stores.’ Yeah! I imagine.”

Building Aficionado

In reality, Keaton is a true 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 community 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 not as driven.” While filming, she saw a lot of doors and posted photos of them to Instagram.

“Goodness gracious. Oh, I love doors. Uh-huh. In fact, I’m looking at them right now.” She enjoys to imagine the comings and goings, “the individuals who lived there or what they offered or why is it empty? It makes you think about all the aspects that pretty much all of us experience. 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 living, that we’re here, and that most of us 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 spoiled. I’m fancy. I’m very upscale. It’s a black car. Yeah. It’s quite nice though. I like it.”

Does she go fast? “No. What I prefer to do is look, so I can have issues with that, when I’m not watching the road, I recall Mom used to tell me: ‘Diane, avoid that. Heavens, be careful. Look ahead. Don’t start looking around when you’re driving.’ Yes.”

Distinct Character

In case it’s not yet clear, speaking to Keaton is like listening to unused clips from Annie Hall sent via carrier pigeon. She’s a singular actor in so many ways – her dislike to plastic procedures, for instance, and hair dye, and anything more exposing than a turtleneck, makes for 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 Venn diagram of Diane as a individual and Diane as an actor,” says Holderman, “is one-of-a-kind. How she exists in the world, her innate nature. She remains constantly in the moment, as a person and as an actor.”

On a particular day, they toured the Sistine Chapel together. “To observe her observe the world is to comprehend who Diane Keaton is,” he says. “She is truly fascinated. She possesses all of that texture in her soul.” Even somewhere more mundane, she’d still be jumping to examine light fittings. “Many people who have that artistic sensibility, as they get older, become self-aware.” Somehow, he says, she hasn’t.

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

Early Life

Keaton was born in an LA suburb 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 skilled housewives. Seeing her crowned on stage prompted a blend of satisfaction and jealousy in Keaton, who was eight at the time.

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