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Even before her dog almost dies, my call with Diane Keaton is chaotic. There is a lag on the line. Conversation stops and starts like a delivery truck. I had sent questions but she hasn’t read 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.

Hollywood’s Most Self-Effacing Celebrity

Now 77, Hollywood’s most self-effacing star doesn’t do video calls. Nor does her role in the Book Club films, the newest of which begins with her having difficulty to speak via her laptop 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 becomes so strange, you know? I suppose 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 Diane Keaton laughing at your joke, I’d like to hear it.

A pause. “I think a little goes plenty,” she says. “That is, don’t do much more.” Once again, I’m uncertain what she meant.

Follow-Up Film

Anyway, in Book Club: The Next Chapter, a follow-up 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 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. “Something like ‘Leslie’. But it was already the second day of shooting.”

In the first film, the bereaved Diane hooks up with Andy García. In the sequel, the four companions go to Italy for Fonda’s bridal shower. Cue big dinners, long sequences (dresses, shops, unclad sculptures), endless innuendo and a remarkably large part for the show’s Hugh Quarshie. And booze. 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 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 really hardened wino. Nevertheless, 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 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 catering to undercatered over-60s who loved Sex and the City. Its plot saw all four women differently shaken by reading Fifty Shades of Grey; in this installment, their homework is The Alchemist. It’s less integral to the plot. It touches about fatalism. “Not something I dwell about,” says Keaton, “because it’s an aspect of it, of what we all face.” A cryptic silence. “And then, sometimes, it’s kind of great.”

What about 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 tangentially. “Which most people don’t do any more. And then getting out and snapping pictures of these shops and structures that have been just decimated. They aren’t there!”

Why are they so haunting? “Because life is haunting! 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 not that at all! It’s just things going up and down!”

I find it hard slightly to picture it. LA is not, after all, a pedestrian city, unless you’re on your last legs. Anybody on the pavement is noticeable – the actress particularly. Does anyone ever ask what she’s doing? “No, because they don’t care. For the most part, they’re just in a hurry and they’re not looking.”

Has she ever sneak into 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 would 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.’ Yes! I bet.”

Architecture Expert

Actually, Keaton is quite the architecture expert. She has earned more money renovating properties for clients (who include Madonna) than she has making movies. You can tell a lot about a society through its city design, she says.: “I think they’re more present in Italy. They feel 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. In fact, I’m looking at them right now.” She enjoys to imagine the comings and goings, “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. Like: oh, I did that movie, but the other one was not succeeding very well, but then, you know, something snuck in.

“It’s truly 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 adore 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 black. Yes. It’s pretty good though. I like it.”

Is she a speeder? “No. What I like to do is observe, so I can have issues with that, when I’m not watching the road, I recall Mom used to tell me: ‘Diane, avoid that. God, watch out. Look ahead. Don’t start gazing about when you’re driving.’ Yes.”

Distinct Character

If 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 plastic procedures, for instance, and coloring, and anything more revealing than a roll-neck, makes for a dramatic contrast with some of her Book Club co-stars. But most charming today is how indistinguishable she seems from her screen self.

“I think the degree of similarity in the comparison of Diane as a individual and Diane as an performer,” says Holderman, “is unique. Her way of being in the world, how she’s wired. She is constantly in the moment, as a human and as an actor.”

On a particular day, they visited the Sistine Chapel together. “To observe her study the world is to comprehend who Diane Keaton is,” he says. “She is truly fascinated. She has all of that texture in her soul.” Even in more ordinary, she’d still be jumping to examine fixtures. “Many people who have that artistic sensibility, as they get older, become self-aware.” Somehow, he says, she has not.

Keaton is generally described as modest. That sort of downplays it. “Maybe she’d be upset for saying this,” says Holderman, cautiously. “She knows 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 life and being that to reflect on the larger … There is no time or space for it.”

Background

Keaton was born in an LA suburb 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 prompted a mix of satisfaction and jealousy in Keaton, who was eight at the time.

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