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Right before her canine companion 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. Each response comes stacked with caveats. It’s fun and stressful – and smart. She aims to escape her own interview.

Hollywood’s Extremely Modest Star

Currently 77, Hollywood’s most humble star doesn’t do 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 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 that bad or anything, but it’s a little odd.” We converse, stop, talk over each other again, a car crash 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 pause. “I believe 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 success, Keaton again plays Diane, a woman in her 70s, bumbling, eccentric, fond of men’s tailoring and broad hats. “We borrowed 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 suggest 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 hooks up with Andy García. In the sequel, the four friends go to Italy for Fonda’s bridal shower. Cue big dinners, long montages (dresses, shops, naked statues), endless innuendo 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? “Absolutely,” says Keaton enthusiastically. “About six in the morning I’ll have a Lillet, or a chardonnay.” It’s now 11am; how many bottles down is she? “Oh God, maybe 25?”

Actually, Keaton has put her name to a white and a red, but both are designed to be drunk over a glass of ice – not the serving suggestion of the really hardened wino. Still, she’s eager to embrace the fiction: “Maybe then I’ll get a new type of part. ‘They say Diane Keaton is a big consumer and you can really push her around. It simplifies things if she just shuts up and drinks.’ Absurd!”

Movie’s Focus

The first Book Club made eight times its budget by serving undercatered over-60s who adored Sex and the City. Its story saw all four women variously affected by reading Fifty Shades of Grey; in this installment, their assigned reading is The Alchemist. It plays a smaller role to the plot. There’s some stuff about destiny. “Not something 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 holding onto 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 avoid any more. And then getting out and photographing these shops and buildings that have been largely destroyed. They’re no longer there!”

What makes them so eerie? “Because existence is haunting! You hold 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. LA is not, after all, a walkable metropolis, unless you’re on your last legs. Anyone on the pavement stands out – Diane Keaton particularly. Does anyone 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.”

Has she ever snuck inside one of the buildings? “No, I couldn’t. My God, I’d be thrown in jail because they’re secured! Are you hoping me to go to jail? That would be better for you. You could write: ‘I was talking to Diane Keaton but then I heard she got thrown in jail cause she tried enter old stores.’ Yeah! I bet.”

Architecture Expert

In reality, Keaton is a true architecture expert. She has earned more money flipping houses 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 think they’re more present in Italy. They’re more there with you. It’s just so 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. Yes. In fact, 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 pretty much all of us experience. Like: oh, I did that movie, but the different project was not working out very well, but then, y’know, something snuck in.

“It’s truly 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 adore my car.”

What type does she have?

“Well, I have a [Mercedes] G-wagon. I’m spoiled. I’m luxurious. I’m really fancy. It’s black. Yes. It’s pretty good though. I like it.”

Does she go fast? “No. What I like to do is observe, so I can have issues with that, when I’m not watching the road, I remember Mom used to tell me: ‘Diane, don’t do that. Heavens, watch out. Focus forward. Don’t begin gazing about when you’re driving.’ Yes.”

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 singular actor in so many ways – her aversion to plastic procedures, for instance, and hair dye, 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 amount 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, how she’s wired. She remains relentlessly in the moment, as a human and as an artist.”

One morning, 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 being.” Even somewhere more ordinary, she’d still be hopping up to examine fixtures. “Many people who have that artistic sensibility, as they get older, become conscious of themselves.” Somehow, he says, she hasn’t.

Keaton is usually described as modest. That somewhat downplays it. “Perhaps she’d be upset 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 life and being that to reflect on the larger … There is no time or space for it.”

Early Life

Keaton was delivered in an LA suburb in 1946, the first of four children for Dorothy and Jack Hall. Dad was an real estate broker, her mother won the regional title in the Mrs America contest for skilled housewives. Seeing her crowned on stage prompted a blend of pride and envy in Keaton, who was eight at the time.

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