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Right before her dog nearly passes away, my conversation with Diane Keaton is chaotic. There’s a delay on the line. Dialogue stops and starts like a delivery truck. I’d emailed questions but she hasn’t read them. She desires to talk about doors. Each response comes filled with qualifications. It’s fun and nerve-wracking – and smart. She wants to escape her own interview.

Hollywood’s Extremely Modest Celebrity

Now 77, the film industry’s most humble star doesn’t do video calls. Nor does her role in the Book Club films, the latest of which starts with her having difficulty to speak via her computer to best friends 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 suppose I mean: it’s not terrible or anything, but it’s a bit unusual.” We converse, stop, interrupt 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 Diane Keaton laughing at your joke, I’d like to hear it.

A brief silence. “I think 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 follow-up to the 2018 hit, Keaton again plays Diane, a woman in her 70s, bumbling, eccentric, partial to men’s tailoring and wide-brimmed hats. “We borrowed a bunch of ideas from her life,” says filmmaker Bill Holderman, who collaborated with his wife, Erin Simms, who speak to 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 original movie, the widowed Diane connects with the actor. In the follow-up, the four friends go to Italy for Fonda’s bachelorette party. Cue big dinners, long montages (dresses, shops, naked statues), endless innuendo and a surprisingly big part for the show’s Hugh Quarshie. And booze. So much booze.

I was impressed by the drinking, I say; is it true to life? “Absolutely,” says Keaton enthusiastically. “Around 6 in the morning I’ll have a Lillet, or a chardonnay.” Currently 11am; how many bottles down is she? “Oh God, maybe 25?”

In fact, 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 recommended way of the truly seasoned wino. Nevertheless, she’s keen to embrace the fiction: “Maybe then I’ll get a new type of part. ‘I hear Diane Keaton is a big consumer and you can really push her around. It simplifies things if she just stays quiet and drinks.’ Ridiculous!”

Film’s Theme

The first Book Club made eight times its budget by serving overlooked over-60s who loved Sex and the City. Its story 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. “Not something I ramble on about,” says Keaton, “because it’s all part of it, of what we all deal with.” 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. “Which most people avoid any more. And then exiting and photographing these shops and buildings that have been just decimated. They aren’t there!”

What makes them so eerie? “Because life is unsettling! You have an idea in your mind of what it is, or what it ought to be, or what it could be. But it’s far from it! It’s just things fluctuating!”

I find it hard slightly to picture it. Los Angeles is not, ultimately, a walkable metropolis, unless you’re on your uppers. Anyone on the pavement is noticeable – Diane Keaton especially. Does anyone ever ask what she is up to? “No, because they aren’t interested. For the most part, they’re just in a rush and they’re not looking.”

Did she ever sneak into one of the buildings? “No, I couldn’t. My God, I’d be arrested 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 enter old stores.’ Yes! I bet.”

Architecture Expert

Actually, Keaton is a true 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 community through its urban planning, she says.: “I believe they’re more present in Italy. They feel more there with you. It’s entirely different from things here. It’s less frantic.” During the shoot, she saw a lot of doors and posted photos of them to Instagram.

“Oh, my God. Oh, I love doors. Uh-huh. In fact, I’m looking 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 makes you think about all the aspects that more or less 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 just so interesting that we’re alive, that we’re here, and that the majority who are fortunate have cars, which transport you all over the place. I love my car.”

What type does she have?

“Well, I have a [Mercedes] G-wagon. I’m spoiled. I’m luxurious. I’m very upscale. It’s a black car. Yeah. It’s pretty good though. I like it.”

Is she a speeder? “No. What I like to do is look, so I can get in trouble with that, when I neglect the road, I remember Mom used to tell me: ‘Diane, avoid that. Heavens, watch out. Focus forward. Don’t begin looking around when you’re driving.’ Yes.”

Unique Persona

In case it’s not yet clear, talking with Keaton is like hearing outtakes from Annie Hall delivered by carrier pigeon. She’s a unique actor in so many ways – her aversion to cosmetic surgery, for instance, and coloring, 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 indistinguishable she seems from her on-screen persona.

“I believe the degree of similarity in the comparison 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 person and as an actor.”

One morning, they toured the Sistine Chapel together. “To watch her study 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 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 conscious of themselves.” In some way, he says, she hasn’t.

Keaton is usually described as modest. That somewhat downplays it. “Maybe 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 film icon. She is completely in the moment of her experience and being that to ponder the larger … There’s just no time or space for it.”

Early Life

Keaton was delivered in an LA suburb 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 contest for accomplished housewives. Seeing 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 – shutterbug, collage artist, potter and journal keeper (85 volumes). Each of Keaton’s autobiographies, as well as her writings, are as much about her mother as, say, {starring|appearing