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Right before her dog almost dies, my conversation with the acclaimed actress is disorderly. 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. Every answer comes stacked with caveats. It’s enjoyable and nerve-wracking – and smart. She aims to evade her own interview.

Hollywood’s Most Self-Effacing Celebrity

Now 77, the film industry’s most self-effacing star doesn’t do video calls. Nor does her character in the Book Club films, the latest of which starts with her having difficulty to speak via her laptop to close companions played by the renowned actress, Mary Steenburgen and Candice Bergen.

“It’s always better when you avoid seeing me,” she says, “or see them, because it becomes so strange, you know? I guess I mean: it’s not terrible or anything, but it’s a little odd.” 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 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.” Once again, I’m uncertain what she meant.

Book Club Sequel

Anyway, in Book Club: The Next Chapter, a sequel to the 2018 success, 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 director 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. “Perhaps ‘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 bridal shower. Expect big dinners, long sequences (dresses, shops, naked statues), endless innuendo and a surprisingly big part for Holby City’s Hugh Quarshie. And booze. So much booze.

I felt amazed 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 glasses consumed is she? “Oh God, maybe 25?”

In fact, Keaton has put her name to a white blend and a red variety, but both are designed to be drunk over a glass of ice – not the serving suggestion of the truly seasoned wino. Still, she’s eager to run with the fiction: “Perhaps 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 makes it much easier if she just stays quiet and drinks.’ Absurd!”

Movie’s Focus

The original Book Club made 8x its cost by serving undercatered over-60s who adored 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 plays a smaller role to the plot. It touches about destiny. “Not something I ramble on about,” says Keaton, “because it’s an aspect of it, of what we all face.” A cryptic silence. “Moreover, sometimes, it’s quite great.”

What about her character’s big speech about holding onto youthful hopes? “I’m sort of addicted to getting in my car and cruising the streets of LA,” she says – again, a bit off-topic. “A habit most people don’t do any more. And then getting out and photographing these shops and structures that have been just decimated. They aren’t there!”

What makes them so haunting? “Because existence is haunting! You have an idea in your mind of what it is, or what it should be, or what it might become. But it’s far from it! It’s just things fluctuating!”

I’m struggling slightly to picture it. Los Angeles is not, after all, 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’s doing? “No, because they don’t care. For the most part, they’re just in a hurry and they’re not looking.”

Did she ever snuck inside one of the buildings? “No, I couldn’t. Goodness, I’d be thrown in jail because they’re secured! You want 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 imagine.”

Architecture Expert

In reality, Keaton is a true architecture expert. She has earned more money renovating properties for patrons (who include Madonna) than she has making movies. You can tell a lot about a society through its urban planning, she says.: “I think they’re more evident 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 entryways and posted photos of them to Instagram.

“Goodness gracious. I adore doors. Yes. Actually, I’m gazing 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 empty? It makes you think about all the facets 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 just so 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.”

Which model does she have?

“So, I have a [Mercedes] G-wagon. I’m a bitch. I’m fancy. I’m really fancy. It’s black. Yes. It’s pretty good though. I like it.”

Is she a speeder? “No. What I prefer to do is observe, so I can have issues with that, when I’m not watching the road, I remember Mom used to tell me: ‘Diane, don’t do that. God, be careful. Look ahead. Don’t start gazing about when you’re driving.’ Yeah.”

Distinct Character

In case it’s not yet clear, talking with Keaton is like listening to outtakes from Annie Hall delivered by carrier pigeon. She’s a unique actor in so many ways – her dislike to cosmetic surgery, for instance, and coloring, and anything more revealing than a turtleneck, creates a stark difference with some of her Book Club co-stars. But most disarming today is how similar she seems from her on-screen persona.

“I think the degree of overlap in the comparison of Diane as a person and Diane as an actor,” says Holderman, “is one-of-a-kind. How she exists in the world, how she’s wired. She remains relentlessly in the moment, as a human and as an actor.”

One morning, they visited the Sistine Chapel together. “To watch her observe the world is to comprehend who Diane Keaton is,” he says. “She remains genuinely fascinated. She possesses all of that depth in her soul.” Even somewhere more mundane, she’d still be jumping to examine light fittings. “Many people who have that artistic sensibility, as they get older, become self-aware.” In some way, he says, she hasn’t.

Keaton is generally described as modest. That sort of downplays it. “Maybe she’d be upset for saying this,” says Holderman, cautiously. “She is aware she’s a movie star, but I don’t think 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.”

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 won the regional title in the Mrs America contest for skilled housewives. Watching her crowned on stage evoked a blend of pride and jealousy in Keaton, who was eight at the time.

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