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Even before her canine companion almost dies, my conversation with the acclaimed actress is chaotic. There’s a delay on the line. Conversation halts and resumes like a milk float. I’d emailed questions but she hasn’t read them. She desires to talk about doors. Each response comes stacked with qualifications. It’s fun and nerve-wracking – and smart. She wants to evade her own interview.

Tinseltown’s Most Self-Effacing Star

Now 77, the film industry’s most self-effacing star doesn’t do video calls. Neither does her role in the Book Club films, the latest of which begins 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 that bad or anything, but it’s a little odd.” We converse, stop, interrupt each other again, a collision of chatter. Yes, phone is so much better, I say, and if there’s any nicer 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. “I mean, don’t do much more.” Once again, I’m uncertain what she meant.

Follow-Up Film

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, quirky, partial to men’s tailoring and wide-brimmed hats. “We borrowed a bunch of ideas from her life,” says director Bill Holderman, who collaborated 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. “Something like ‘Leslie’. But it was by then the second day of shooting.”

In the first film, the widowed Diane hooks up with Andy García. In the follow-up, the four friends go to Italy for Fonda’s bridal shower. Expect big dinners, long montages (frocks, shops, naked statues), endless innuendo and a surprisingly big part for the show’s Hugh Quarshie. And alcohol. So much drink.

I was impressed by the drinking, I say; is it accurate? “Oh yeah,” says Keaton gamely. “About six in the morning I’ll drink a Lillet, or a chardonnay.” It’s now 11am; how many bottles down is she? “Oh God, maybe 25?”

In fact, Keaton has put her name to a white and a red variety, but both are intended to be drunk over a glass of ice – not the recommended way of the truly seasoned wino. Still, she’s keen to run with the fiction: “Perhaps then I’ll get a new type of part. ‘They say Diane Keaton is a heavy drinker and you can easily influence her. It makes it much easier if she just shuts up and drinks.’ Ridiculous!”

Film’s Theme

The first Book Club made 8x its cost by serving overlooked over-60s who loved 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 fatalism. “Nothing I ramble on about,” says Keaton, “because it’s all part of it, of what we all deal with.” A gnomic pause. “And then, sometimes, it’s kind of great.”

What about her character’s big speech about holding onto youthful hopes? “I’m somewhat addicted to getting in my car and cruising the streets of LA,” she says – once more, a bit tangentially. “Which most people don’t do any more. And then getting out and snapping pictures of these shops and structures that have been largely destroyed. They’re no longer there!”

What makes them 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 might become. But it’s far from it! It’s just things going up and down!”

I’m struggling slightly to visualize it. LA is not, after all, a pedestrian city, unless you’re on your last legs. Anybody on the sidewalk is noticeable – the actress particularly. Does anyone ever ask what she is up to? “No, because they don’t care. Generally, they’re just in a rush and they’re not looking.”

Did she ever snuck inside one of the buildings? “Oh, I can’t. My God, I’d be arrested because they’re locked up! You want me to go to jail? That’d be better for you. You could write: ‘I spoke to Diane Keaton but then I learned she got thrown in jail because she tried get inside old stores.’ Yeah! I bet.”

Building Aficionado

In reality, Keaton is quite the 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.” While filming, she saw a lot of entryways and posted photos of them to Instagram.

“Goodness gracious. Oh, I love doors. Yes. In fact, I’m gazing at them right now.” She enjoys to imagine the exits and entrances, “the individuals who lived there or what they offered or why is it empty? It prompts reflection about all the facets that more or less all of us experience. Such as: oh, I did that movie, but the different project was not working out very well, but then, you know, something crept 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 love my car.”

What type does she have?

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

Is she a speeder? “No. What I like to do is look, 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. Heavens, be careful. Focus forward. Don’t start looking around when you’re driving.’ Yes.”

Distinct Character

In case it’s not yet clear, talking with Keaton is like listening to outtakes from Annie Hall 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 exposing than a turtleneck, makes for a dramatic contrast with some of her film co-stars. But most disarming today is how similar she seems from her on-screen persona.

“I believe the degree of overlap in the comparison of Diane as a person and Diane as an performer,” says Holderman, “is unique. How she exists in the world, her innate nature. She remains relentlessly 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 understand who Diane Keaton is,” he says. “She remains genuinely fascinated. She has all of that depth in her being.” Even somewhere more mundane, she’d still be jumping to examine fixtures. “A lot of people who have that artistic sensibility, as they get older, become conscious of themselves.” In some way, he says, she hasn’t.

Keaton is generally described as self-deprecating. That sort of underplays it. “Perhaps she’d be upset for saying this,” says Holderman, cautiously. “She is aware she’s a movie star, but I don’t think 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 born in an LA outskirt in 1946, the eldest of four kids for Dorothy and Jack Hall. Her father was an real estate broker, her mother won the regional title in the Mrs America competition for skilled housewives. Seeing her crowned on stage evoked a mix of satisfaction and envy in Keaton, who was eight at the time.

Dorothy was also a productive – and unfulfilled – shutterbug, collagist, ceramicist and journal keeper (85 volumes). Both of Keaton’s autobiographies, as well as her writings, are as much about her parent as, say, {starring|appearing