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Right before her dog nearly passes away, my call with the acclaimed actress is chaotic. There is a lag 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 entryways. Every answer comes stacked with qualifications. It’s fun and nerve-wracking – and intelligent. She aims to escape her own interview.

Hollywood’s Most Self-Effacing Celebrity

Currently 77, the film industry’s most self-effacing 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 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 terrible or anything, but it’s a little odd.” We converse, stop, interrupt each other again, a collision of chatter. Indeed, phone is so much better, I say, and if there’s any more pleasant sound than the star laughing at your joke, I’d like to hear it.

A pause. “I think a little goes plenty,” she says. “I mean, don’t do much more.” Not for the last time, I’m uncertain what she meant.

Book Club Sequel

In any case, in Book Club: The Next Chapter, a follow-up to the 2018 hit, Keaton once again plays Diane, a woman in her 70s, bumbling, eccentric, partial to men’s tailoring and wide-brimmed hats. “We stole a bunch of ideas from her life,” says director 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 first film, the bereaved Diane hooks up with the actor. In the sequel, the four companions go to Italy for Fonda’s bridal shower. Cue big dinners, long sequences (dresses, shops, unclad sculptures), endless double entendre and a surprisingly big part for Holby City’s Hugh Quarshie. And alcohol. 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.” It’s now 11am; how many bottles down is she? “Oh God, maybe 25?”

In fact, Keaton has launched a white and a red variety, but both are intended to be drunk over a tumbler of ice – not the serving suggestion of the really hardened wino. Nevertheless, she’s keen to run with the fiction: “Maybe then I’ll get a different kind of part. ‘They say Diane Keaton is a heavy drinker and you can easily influence her. It simplifies things if she just shuts up and drinks.’ Ridiculous!”

Film’s Theme

The first Book Club made 8x its budget by catering to undercatered over-60s who adored 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. “Nothing I dwell about,” says Keaton, “because it’s an aspect 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 cruising the streets of LA,” she says – again, a bit off-topic. “Which most people don’t do any more. And then exiting and photographing these shops and buildings that have been just decimated. They aren’t there!”

Why are they so eerie? “Because existence 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 going up and down!”

I find it hard slightly to visualize it. LA is not, ultimately, a walkable metropolis, 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. For the most part, they’re just in a hurry 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! 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 get inside old stores.’ Yeah! I bet.”

Building Aficionado

In reality, Keaton is quite the 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 urban planning, she says.: “I believe they’re more evident in Italy. They feel more there with you. It’s just so different from things here. It’s less frantic.” During the shoot, she saw a lot of entryways 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 people 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 experience. Such as: oh, I did that movie, but the other one was not succeeding very well, but then, y’know, something crept in.

“It’s truly interesting that we’re living, that we’re here, and that most of us who are lucky have cars, which transport you all over the place. I adore my car.”

Which model does she have?

“So, I have a [Mercedes] G-wagon. I’m spoiled. I’m fancy. I’m really fancy. It’s a black car. 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 neglect the road, I remember Mom used to tell me: ‘Diane, don’t do that. God, be careful. Look ahead. Don’t begin looking around when you’re driving.’ Yes.”

Unique Persona

If it’s not yet clear, speaking to Keaton is like hearing outtakes from Annie Hall delivered by carrier pigeon. She’s a singular actor in so many ways – her aversion to cosmetic surgery, for instance, and coloring, and anything more revealing than a roll-neck, makes for a dramatic contrast with some of her film co-stars. But most charming today is how similar she seems from her on-screen persona.

“I believe the amount of similarity in the Venn diagram of Diane as a person and Diane as an actor,” says Holderman, “is one-of-a-kind. How she exists in the world, her innate nature. She remains constantly in the moment, as a person and as an artist.”

One morning, they toured the Sistine Chapel together. “To watch her study the world is to comprehend who Diane Keaton is,” he says. “She remains genuinely fascinated. She possesses all of that texture in her soul.” Even somewhere more mundane, she’d still be hopping up to examine light fittings. “A lot of people who have that artistic sensibility, as they get older, become self-aware.” In some way, he says, she has not.

Keaton is generally described as modest. That somewhat downplays it. “Perhaps she’d kill me for saying this,” says Holderman, cautiously. “She knows she’s a celebrity, but I don’t believe she knows she’s a movie star. She is completely 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 eldest of four children for Dorothy and Jack Hall. Dad was an real estate broker, her mother earned the regional title in the Mrs America competition for skilled housewives. Seeing her honored on stage evoked a mix of satisfaction and envy in Keaton, who was eight at the time.

Dorothy was also a productive – and frustrated – shutterbug, 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, say, {starring|appearing