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Even before her canine companion nearly passes away, my conversation with Diane Keaton is chaotic. There’s a delay on the line. Dialogue halts and resumes like a delivery truck. I had sent questions but she hasn’t read them. She desires to talk about doors. Each response comes filled with caveats. It’s enjoyable and stressful – and intelligent. She aims to escape her own interview.

Hollywood’s Most Self-Effacing Star

Currently 77, the film industry’s most self-effacing star doesn’t do video calls. Neither does her character in the literary group films, the latest 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 car crash 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 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.

Follow-Up Film

In any case, in Book Club: The Next Chapter, a sequel to the 2018 success, Keaton again plays Diane, a woman in her 70s, clumsy, quirky, fond of men’s tailoring and wide-brimmed hats. “We stole a bunch of ideas from her life,” says filmmaker Bill Holderman, who co-wrote with his wife, Erin Simms, who talk with me over Zoom a few days later. Keaton did suggest 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 bereaved Diane hooks up with Andy García. In the follow-up, the four companions go to Italy for Fonda’s bachelorette party. Cue big dinners, long montages (dresses, shops, unclad sculptures), endless innuendo and a remarkably large part for the show’s Hugh Quarshie. And alcohol. So much booze.

I was impressed by the drinking, I say; is it accurate? “Absolutely,” 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?”

Actually, Keaton has launched a white and a red, but both are intended to be drunk over a glass of ice – not the serving suggestion of the truly seasoned wino. Still, she’s keen to run with the fiction: “Perhaps 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 makes it much easier if she just stays quiet and drinks.’ Absurd!”

Film’s Theme

The first Book Club made eight times its budget by serving overlooked over-60s who loved Sex and the City. Its plot saw all four women differently affected by reading Fifty Shades of Grey; this time round, their assigned reading is The Alchemist. It’s less integral to the plot. There’s some stuff about fatalism. “Nothing I ramble on about,” says Keaton, “because it’s all part of it, of what we all face.” A gnomic pause. “Moreover, sometimes, it’s kind of great.”

What about her character’s big monologue 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 off-topic. “Which most people don’t do any more. And then exiting and photographing these stores and buildings that have been just decimated. They’re no longer there!”

Why are they so eerie? “Because existence is unsettling! You hold an idea in your mind of what it is, or what it should be, or what it could be. But it’s far from it! It’s just things going up and down!”

I find it hard slightly to picture it. Los Angeles is not, ultimately, a pedestrian city, unless you’re on your last legs. Anyone on the pavement stands out – Diane Keaton especially. Does anyone ever ask what she’s doing? “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? “Oh, I can’t. Goodness, 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 was talking to Diane Keaton but then I heard she got incarcerated cause she tried enter old stores.’ Yeah! I imagine.”

Architecture Expert

Actually, Keaton is quite the architecture specialist. She has earned more money renovating properties for clients (who include Madonna) than she has making movies. You can tell a lot about a community through its urban planning, she says.: “I believe they’re more present in Italy. They’re more there with you. It’s entirely different from things here. It’s less frantic.” During the shoot, 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 exits and entrances, “the individuals who lived there or what they sold or why is it vacant? It prompts reflection about all the facets that more or less all of us experience. Like: oh, I did that movie, but the different project 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 the majority who are lucky have cars, which take you all over the place. I adore my car.”

Which model does she have?

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

Does she go fast? “No. What I like to do is observe, so I can get in trouble with that, when I’m not watching the road, I remember Mom used to tell me: ‘Diane, avoid that. God, be careful. Look ahead. Don’t start gazing about when you’re driving.’ Yes.”

Unique Persona

In case it’s not yet clear, talking with 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 revealing than a roll-neck, creates a stark difference with some of her Book Club co-stars. But most disarming today is how similar she seems from her on-screen persona.

“I think the degree of overlap in the comparison of Diane as a individual and Diane as an performer,” says Holderman, “is one-of-a-kind. How she exists in the world, her innate nature. She is constantly in the moment, as a person and as an actor.”

One morning, they toured the Sistine Chapel together. “To observe her observe the world is to understand who Diane Keaton is,” he says. “She remains truly fascinated. She has all of that depth in her soul.” Even in more ordinary, she’d still be hopping up to examine light fittings. “Many people who have that artistic sensibility, as they get older, become self-aware.” In some way, he says, she has not.

Keaton is usually described as self-deprecating. That somewhat underplays it. “Perhaps she’d be upset for saying this,” says Holderman, carefully. “She knows she’s a celebrity, but I don’t believe she knows she’s a movie star. She’s just so in the moment of her life and existence that to ponder the larger … There’s just no time or space for it.”

Early Life

Keaton was delivered in an LA outskirt in 1946, the first of four kids for Dorothy and Jack Hall. Dad was an real estate broker, her mother won the regional title in the Mrs America competition for skilled housewives. Seeing her honored on stage evoked a blend of satisfaction and envy in Keaton, who was eight at the time.

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