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Even before her dog nearly passes away, my conversation with Diane Keaton is chaotic. There is a lag on the line. Conversation stops and starts like a milk float. I had sent questions but she hasn’t read them. She desires to talk about entryways. Every answer comes stacked with caveats. It’s fun and stressful – and smart. She wants to evade her own interview.

Hollywood’s Extremely Modest Celebrity

Currently 77, Hollywood’s most humble star avoids video calls. Nor does her role in the literary group films, the latest of which begins with her struggling 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, interrupt 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 Diane Keaton laughing at your joke, I’d like to hear it.

A pause. “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.

Follow-Up Film

Anyway, 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 wide-brimmed hats. “We stole a bunch of ideas from her life,” says filmmaker Bill Holderman, who collaborated 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. “Something like ‘Leslie’. But it was already the second day of shooting.”

In the first film, the bereaved Diane connects with the actor. In the follow-up, the four companions go to Italy for Fonda’s bridal shower. Expect big dinners, long montages (frocks, shops, unclad sculptures), endless double entendre 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? “Oh yeah,” 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 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 eager to embrace the fiction: “Perhaps then I’ll get a new type 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.’ Absurd!”

Movie’s Focus

The original Book Club made 8x its budget by serving 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 plays a smaller role to the plot. There’s some stuff about fatalism. “Not something 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.”

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

What makes them so eerie? “Because life 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 not that at all! It’s just things fluctuating!”

I’m struggling slightly to picture it. LA is not, after all, a pedestrian city, unless you’re on your last legs. Anybody on the pavement stands out – Diane Keaton especially. Do people ever ask what she is up to? “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? “No, I couldn’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 heard she got incarcerated cause she tried enter old stores.’ Yes! I imagine.”

Architecture Expert

Actually, Keaton is a true architecture expert. She has earned more money renovating properties for patrons (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 entirely different from things here. It’s less frantic.” While filming, she saw a lot of entryways and posted photos of them to Instagram.

“Oh, my God. Oh, I love doors. Yes. In fact, I’m looking at them right now.” She enjoys to imagine the exits and entrances, “the individuals who lived there or what they sold or why is it vacant? It makes you think about all the aspects that pretty much all of us go through. Like: oh, I did that movie, but the different project was not succeeding very well, but then, y’know, something crept in.

“It’s truly interesting that we’re alive, that we’re here, and that most of us who are fortunate have cars, which take 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 a black car. Yes. It’s quite nice 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 remember Mom used to tell me: ‘Diane, don’t do that. God, watch out. Focus forward. Don’t begin gazing about when you’re driving.’ Yes.”

Distinct Character

In case it’s not yet clear, talking with Keaton is like hearing outtakes from Annie Hall sent via carrier pigeon. She’s a singular actor in so many ways – her aversion to cosmetic surgery, for instance, and hair dye, and anything more revealing than a turtleneck, makes for a dramatic contrast with some of her Book Club co-stars. But most disarming today is how indistinguishable she seems from her on-screen persona.

“I believe the amount of overlap in the Venn diagram of Diane as a person and Diane as an actor,” says Holderman, “is unique. Her way of being in the world, her innate nature. She is 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 understand who Diane Keaton is,” he says. “She remains truly fascinated. She possesses all of that depth in her soul.” Even somewhere more ordinary, she’d still be hopping up to examine light fittings. “Many people who have that artistic sensibility, as they get older, become conscious of themselves.” Somehow, he says, she has not.

Keaton is generally described as modest. That somewhat underplays it. “Perhaps she’d kill me for saying this,” says Holderman, carefully. “She knows she’s a celebrity, but I don’t think she knows she’s a movie star. She’s just so in the moment of her experience and being that to ponder 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 children for Dorothy and Jack Hall. Her father was an real estate broker, her mother earned the local crown in the Mrs America competition for accomplished housewives. Watching her crowned on stage prompted a mix of satisfaction and jealousy in Keaton, who was eight at the time.

Dorothy was also a prolific – and frustrated – shutterbug, collagist, ceramicist and journal keeper (85 volumes). Each of Keaton’s memoirs, as well as her essay collection, are as much about her parent as, say, {starring|appearing