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Right before her canine companion almost dies, my conversation 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 hasn’t read them. She wants to talk about doors. Each response comes filled with caveats. It’s fun and nerve-wracking – and intelligent. She wants to escape her own interview.

Tinseltown’s Most Self-Effacing Star

Currently 77, the film industry’s most humble star avoids video calls. Neither does her character in the Book Club films, the newest 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 turns quite odd, you know? I suppose I mean: it’s not that bad or anything, but it’s a bit unusual.” We both talk, stop, interrupt each other again, a collision 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 think a little goes plenty,” she says. “That is, don’t do much more.” Not for the last time, I’m uncertain what she meant.

Follow-Up Film

In any case, in the sequel to Book Club, a sequel to the 2018 success, Keaton once again plays Diane, a woman in her 70s, clumsy, eccentric, partial to men’s tailoring and broad 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 suggest they change her character’s name, says Simms. “Perhaps ‘Leslie’. But it was by then the second day of shooting.”

In the first film, the bereaved Diane hooks up with Andy García. In the sequel, the four friends go to Italy for Fonda’s bachelorette party. Cue big dinners, long sequences (dresses, shops, naked statues), endless innuendo and a remarkably large part for Holby City’s Hugh Quarshie. And booze. So much drink.

I was impressed by the drinking, I say; is it true to life? “Oh yeah,” says Keaton gamely. “About six in the morning I’ll drink a Lillet, or a chardonnay.” It’s now 11am; how many glasses consumed is she? “Goodness, maybe 25?”

Actually, Keaton has put her name to a white blend and a red, but both are intended to be drunk over a glass of ice – not the serving suggestion of the truly seasoned wino. Still, she’s keen to embrace the fiction: “Maybe then I’ll get a new type of part. ‘They say Diane Keaton is a big consumer 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 eight times its cost by catering to overlooked over-60s who loved Sex and the City. Its story saw all four women differently affected by reading Fifty Shades of Grey; in this installment, their homework is The Alchemist. It’s less integral to the plot. It touches about destiny. “Nothing I dwell about,” says Keaton, “because it’s all part of it, of what we all deal with.” A gnomic pause. “And then, sometimes, it’s quite great.”

Regarding her character’s big speech 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 off-topic. “A habit most people don’t do any more. And then getting out and photographing these stores and buildings that have been largely destroyed. They aren’t there!”

What makes them so haunting? “Because existence is haunting! 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’m struggling slightly to visualize it. Los Angeles is not, after all, a pedestrian city, unless you’re on your uppers. Anyone on the sidewalk is noticeable – the actress 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 hurry and they’re not looking.”

Has she ever snuck inside one of the buildings? “Oh, I can’t. My God, I’d be arrested because they’re secured! Are you hoping me to go to jail? That would be better for you. You could write: ‘I spoke to Diane Keaton but then I heard she got thrown in jail cause she tried get inside old stores.’ Yes! I bet.”

Building Aficionado

In reality, Keaton is quite the architecture specialist. 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 urban planning, she says.: “I believe they’re more present in Italy. They feel more there with you. It’s just so different from things here. It’s not as driven.” During the shoot, she saw a lot of entryways and shared 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 people who lived there or what they sold or why is it vacant? It prompts reflection about all the aspects that more or less all of us experience. Such as: 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 alive, that we’re here, and that most of us who are fortunate have cars, which transport you all over the place. I adore my car.”

Which model does she have?

“Well, I have a [Mercedes] G-wagon. I’m spoiled. I’m fancy. I’m very upscale. It’s black. Yeah. It’s quite nice though. I enjoy it.”

Does she go fast? “No. What I prefer 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, don’t do that. God, watch out. Look ahead. Don’t start gazing about when you’re driving.’ Yes.”

Distinct Character

In case it’s not yet clear, talking with Keaton is like hearing unused clips from Annie Hall sent via carrier pigeon. She’s a unique actor in so many ways – her dislike to plastic procedures, for instance, and coloring, and anything more revealing than a roll-neck, makes for a stark difference with some of her Book Club co-stars. But most charming today is how similar she seems from her on-screen persona.

“I think the degree 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, how she’s wired. She is relentlessly in the moment, as a human and as an artist.”

On a particular day, they visited the Sistine Chapel together. “To observe her observe the world is to understand who Diane Keaton is,” he says. “She is genuinely fascinated. She possesses all of that texture in her soul.” Even in more ordinary, she’d still be hopping up to examine fixtures. “A lot of people who have that artistic sensibility, as they get older, become self-aware.” Somehow, he says, she hasn’t.

Keaton is usually described as self-deprecating. That sort of underplays 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 movie star. She is completely in the moment of her life 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 suburb in 1946, the first of four children for Dorothy and Jack Hall. Her father was an real estate broker, her mother earned the local crown in the Mrs America contest for skilled housewives. Watching her honored on stage evoked a blend of satisfaction and jealousy in Keaton, who was eight at the time.

Dorothy was also a prolific – and frustrated – photographer, collagist, ceramicist and diarist (85 volumes). Each of Keaton’s autobiographies, as well as her essay collection, are as much about her parent as, for example, {starring|appearing