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Right before her canine companion almost dies, my conversation with Diane Keaton is chaotic. There’s a delay on the line. Conversation halts and resumes like a milk float. I had sent questions but she didn’t review them. She desires to talk about doors. Every answer comes stacked with qualifications. It’s fun and stressful – and smart. She wants to escape her own interview.

Hollywood’s Most Self-Effacing Celebrity

Now 77, Hollywood’s most humble star avoids video calls. Nor does her role in the Book Club films, the newest of which starts 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 turns quite odd, you know? I guess I mean: it’s not terrible or anything, but it’s a bit unusual.” We converse, 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 the star 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.” Once again, I’m not exactly sure what she meant.

Follow-Up Film

Anyway, in the sequel to Book Club, a sequel to the 2018 hit, Keaton once again plays Diane, a woman in her 70s, clumsy, eccentric, partial to men’s tailoring and broad hats. “We stole a bunch of ideas from her life,” says filmmaker Bill Holderman, who co-wrote 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. “Perhaps ‘Leslie’. But it was by then 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 bachelorette party. Cue big dinners, long sequences (dresses, 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 true to life? “Absolutely,” says Keaton gamely. “About six in the morning I’ll drink a Lillet, or a chardonnay.” Currently 11am; how many glasses consumed is she? “Oh God, maybe 25?”

In fact, Keaton has launched 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. Still, she’s eager to run with 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 shuts up and drinks.’ Ridiculous!”

Film’s Theme

The first Book Club made eight times its cost by catering to undercatered over-60s who adored Sex and the City. Its plot saw all four women variously affected by reading Fifty Shades of Grey; this time round, their assigned reading is The Alchemist. It’s less integral to the plot. It touches about destiny. “Nothing I dwell about,” says Keaton, “because it’s all part of it, of what we all face.” A cryptic silence. “Moreover, sometimes, it’s kind of great.”

What about her character’s big speech about hanging on to youthful hopes? “I’m sort of addicted to getting in my car and driving through the streets of LA,” she says – again, a bit off-topic. “Which most people don’t do any more. And then getting out and snapping pictures of these stores and structures that have been largely destroyed. They aren’t there!”

Why are they so eerie? “Because life is haunting! You have an idea in your mind of what it is, or what it ought to be, or what it could be. But it’s not that at all! It’s just things going up and down!”

I find it hard slightly to picture it. LA is not, ultimately, a walkable metropolis, unless you’re on your uppers. Anyone on the sidewalk stands out – the actress particularly. Do people ever ask what she’s doing? “No, because they don’t care. For the most part, they’re just in a hurry and they’re not looking.”

Has she ever snuck inside one of the buildings? “Oh, I can’t. My God, I’d be thrown in jail because they’re secured! You want me to go to jail? That would be better for you. You can use this: ‘I spoke to Diane Keaton but then I learned she got incarcerated because she tried enter old stores.’ Yeah! I imagine.”

Building Aficionado

Actually, Keaton is quite the architecture specialist. She has earned more money renovating properties for clients (who include Madonna) than she has making movies. One can discern a lot about a society through its urban planning, she says.: “I believe they’re more evident in Italy. They feel more there with you. It’s entirely different from things here. It’s less frantic.” While filming, she saw a lot of entryways and shared photos of them to Instagram.

“Goodness gracious. I adore doors. Yes. In fact, I’m gazing 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 go through. Like: oh, I did that movie, but the other one was not succeeding very well, but then, you know, something snuck in.

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

What type does she have?

“Well, I have a [Mercedes] G-wagon. I’m spoiled. I’m luxurious. 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 observe, so I can get in trouble with that, when I’m not watching the road, I recall Mom used to tell me: ‘Diane, avoid that. God, be careful. Focus forward. Don’t start looking around when you’re driving.’ Yes.”

Unique Persona

If it’s not yet clear, talking with Keaton is like hearing unused clips 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 exposing than a turtleneck, makes for a stark difference with some of her Book Club co-stars. But most disarming today is how indistinguishable she seems from her screen self.

“I think the degree of overlap in the comparison 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 is constantly in the moment, as a human and as an actor.”

On a particular day, they visited the Sistine Chapel together. “To observe her observe the world is to understand who Diane Keaton is,” he says. “She is genuinely fascinated. She has all of that texture in her soul.” Even in more ordinary, she’d still be hopping up to examine light fittings. “Many people who have that creative instinct, as they get older, become self-aware.” In some way, he says, she has not.

Keaton is usually described as modest. That somewhat underplays it. “Maybe she’d be upset for saying this,” says Holderman, cautiously. “She is aware she’s a celebrity, but I don’t think 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 is 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 won the regional title in the Mrs America competition for accomplished housewives. Watching her crowned on stage evoked a blend of pride and envy in Keaton, who was eight at the time.

Dorothy was also a prolific – and unfulfilled – photographer, collage artist, potter and diarist (85 volumes). Each of Keaton’s autobiographies, as well as her writings, are as much about her parent as, for example, {starring|appearing