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Even before her canine companion nearly passes away, my call with Diane Keaton is chaotic. There’s a delay on the line. Dialogue stops and starts like a milk float. I had sent questions but she didn’t review them. She wants to talk about entryways. Each response comes filled with qualifications. It’s enjoyable and stressful – and intelligent. She aims to escape her own interview.

Tinseltown’s Extremely Modest Celebrity

Currently 77, Hollywood’s most humble star avoids video calls. Nor does her role in the literary group films, the newest of which starts with her having difficulty to speak via her laptop to best friends played by Jane Fonda, 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 guess I mean: it’s not that bad or anything, but it’s a little odd.” We both talk, stop, interrupt each other again, a collision of chatter. Yes, phone is so much better, I say, and if there’s any more pleasant sound than Diane Keaton 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 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 once again plays Diane, a woman in her 70s, bumbling, eccentric, fond of men’s tailoring and broad hats. “We stole a bunch of ideas from her life,” says director Bill Holderman, who co-wrote with his wife, Erin Simms, who talk with 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 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 Holby City’s Hugh Quarshie. And alcohol. So much drink.

I felt amazed 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.” It’s now 11am; how many glasses consumed is she? “Oh God, maybe 25?”

In fact, Keaton has launched 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 keen 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 makes it much easier if she just shuts up and drinks.’ Ridiculous!”

Film’s Theme

The original Book Club made eight times its budget by serving undercatered over-60s who adored Sex and the City. Its plot saw all four women differently 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 fatalism. “Nothing I ramble on about,” says Keaton, “because it’s all part of it, of what we all deal with.” A gnomic pause. “Moreover, sometimes, it’s kind of great.”

Regarding her character’s big monologue about hanging on to youthful hopes? “I’m somewhat addicted to getting in my car and driving through the streets of LA,” she says – once more, a bit off-topic. “A habit most people don’t do any more. And then getting out and photographing these shops and buildings that have been just decimated. They aren’t there!”

What makes them so haunting? “Because existence is unsettling! You hold an idea in your mind of what it is, or what it ought to be, or what it might become. But it’s far from it! It’s just things going up and down!”

I find it hard slightly to picture it. LA is not, ultimately, a pedestrian city, unless you’re on your last legs. Anybody on the sidewalk is noticeable – the actress especially. Does anyone ever ask what she is up to? “No, because they don’t care. Generally, they’re just in a hurry and they’re not looking.”

Has she ever sneak into one of the buildings? “Oh, I can’t. Goodness, I’d be thrown in jail because they’re locked up! Are you hoping 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 get inside old stores.’ Yes! I bet.”

Architecture Expert

In reality, Keaton is quite the architecture specialist. She’s made more money flipping houses for patrons (who include Madonna) than she has making movies. One can discern 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 just so different from things here. It’s less frantic.” While filming, she saw a lot of doors and posted photos of them to Instagram.

“Oh, my God. I adore doors. Yes. Actually, I’m gazing at them right now.” She likes to imagine the exits and entrances, “the people who lived there or what they offered or why is it vacant? It prompts reflection about all the facets that pretty much all of us go through. Such as: oh, I did that movie, but the different project was not working out 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 lucky have cars, which take you all over the place. I love my car.”

What type does she have?

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

Is she a speeder? “No. What I prefer to do is look, 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. Heavens, watch out. Look ahead. Don’t start looking around when you’re driving.’ Yeah.”

Unique Persona

If it’s not yet clear, talking with Keaton is like listening to outtakes from the classic film delivered by carrier pigeon. She’s a unique actor in so many ways – her dislike to plastic procedures, for instance, and coloring, and anything more exposing than a roll-neck, creates a dramatic contrast with some of her film co-stars. But most disarming today is how similar she seems from her screen self.

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

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 genuinely fascinated. She possesses all of that texture in her soul.” Even in more ordinary, she’d still be jumping to examine fixtures. “Many people who have that creative instinct, as they get older, become self-aware.” Somehow, 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 is aware she’s a celebrity, but I don’t believe she knows she’s a film icon. She’s just so in the moment of her experience and being that to reflect on the larger … There’s just no time or space for it.”

Background

Keaton was delivered in an LA outskirt in 1946, the eldest of four kids for Dorothy and Jack Hall. Dad was an estate agent, her mother earned the regional title in the Mrs America competition for accomplished housewives. Watching her honored on stage prompted a blend of pride and jealousy in Keaton, who was eight at the time.

Dorothy was also a productive – and frustrated – photographer, collage artist, ceramicist and journal keeper (85 volumes). Both of Keaton’s autobiographies, as well as her essay collection, are as much about her parent as, for example, {starring|appearing