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Even before her canine companion almost dies, my call with Diane Keaton is disorderly. There’s a delay on the line. Dialogue halts and resumes like a delivery truck. I’d emailed questions but she didn’t review them. She wants to talk about entryways. Each response comes filled with qualifications. It’s enjoyable and stressful – and smart. She aims to escape her own interview.

Tinseltown’s Extremely Modest Celebrity

Currently 77, the film industry’s most humble star doesn’t do video calls. Nor does her character in the Book Club films, the newest of which begins 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 avoid seeing me,” she says, “or see them, because it turns quite odd, you know? I guess I mean: it’s not terrible or anything, but it’s a little odd.” We both talk, stop, interrupt each other again, a car crash of chatter. Indeed, phone is so much better, I say, and if there’s any nicer 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.” Not for the last time, I’m uncertain what she meant.

Follow-Up Film

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, clumsy, eccentric, partial to men’s tailoring and wide-brimmed hats. “We stole 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 propose they change her character’s name, says Simms. “Perhaps ‘Leslie’. But it was already the second day of shooting.”

In the first film, the bereaved Diane connects with Andy García. In the follow-up, 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 alcohol. So much drink.

I felt amazed by the drinking, I say; is it accurate? “Absolutely,” says Keaton gamely. “About six in the morning I’ll have a Lillet, or a chardonnay.” Currently 11am; how many glasses consumed is she? “Goodness, maybe 25?”

In fact, Keaton has launched a white blend and a red variety, but both are designed to be drunk over a tumbler of ice – not the serving suggestion of the truly seasoned wino. Still, she’s keen 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 easily influence her. It simplifies things if she just stays quiet and drinks.’ Ridiculous!”

Film’s Theme

The original Book Club made eight times its budget by serving undercatered over-60s who loved Sex and the City. Its story saw all four women differently 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 dwell about,” says Keaton, “because it’s an aspect of it, of what we all deal with.” A cryptic silence. “Moreover, sometimes, it’s kind of great.”

Regarding 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. “A habit most people don’t do any more. And then exiting and photographing these stores and buildings that have been just decimated. They aren’t there!”

What makes them so haunting? “Because existence 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 far from it! It’s just things going up and down!”

I find it hard slightly to visualize it. LA is not, after all, a pedestrian city, unless you’re on your last legs. Anybody on the sidewalk is noticeable – Diane Keaton particularly. Do people ever ask what she’s doing? “No, because they don’t care. For the most part, they’re just in a rush and they’re not looking.”

Has she ever sneak into one of the buildings? “Oh, I can’t. Goodness, I’d be thrown in jail because they’re secured! 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 get inside old stores.’ Yes! I bet.”

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 city design, she says.: “I think they’re more evident in Italy. They feel more there with you. It’s entirely 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. Uh-huh. Actually, 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 empty? It prompts reflection about all the aspects that pretty much all of us experience. Like: oh, I did that movie, but the other one was not working out very well, but then, you 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 take 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 really fancy. It’s a black car. Yes. It’s pretty good though. I like it.”

Does she go fast? “No. What I like 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, avoid that. God, watch out. Focus forward. Don’t begin looking around when you’re driving.’ Yeah.”

Distinct Character

If it’s not yet clear, talking with Keaton is like listening to outtakes from Annie Hall delivered by carrier pigeon. She’s a singular actor in so many ways – her aversion to plastic procedures, for instance, and coloring, and anything more revealing than a turtleneck, creates a dramatic contrast with some of her Book Club co-stars. But most charming today is how similar she seems from her screen self.

“I think the degree of overlap in the comparison of Diane as a individual and Diane as an performer,” says Holderman, “is one-of-a-kind. Her way of being in the world, her innate nature. She remains constantly in the moment, as a human and as an artist.”

On a particular day, they visited the Sistine Chapel together. “To watch her observe the world is to comprehend who Diane Keaton is,” he says. “She is genuinely fascinated. She has all of that depth in her soul.” Even somewhere more ordinary, she’d still be hopping up to examine fixtures. “Many people who have that creative instinct, as they get older, become self-aware.” In some way, he says, she has not.

Keaton is generally described as self-deprecating. That sort of underplays it. “Perhaps she’d be upset 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’s just so in the moment of her experience and existence that to ponder the larger … There is 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. Dad was an real estate broker, her mother earned the regional title in the Mrs America competition for accomplished 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 productive – and unfulfilled – shutterbug, collagist, ceramicist and journal keeper (85 volumes). Both of Keaton’s memoirs, as well as her writings, are as much about her parent as, for example, {starring|appearing