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Even before her dog almost dies, my conversation with Diane Keaton is disorderly. There is a lag on the line. Conversation stops and starts like a milk float. 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 nerve-wracking – and intelligent. She wants to escape her own interview.

Hollywood’s Most Self-Effacing Star

Now 77, the film industry’s most self-effacing star doesn’t do video calls. Neither does her character in the literary group films, the latest of which begins with her struggling to speak via her laptop to close companions played by Jane Fonda, 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 both talk, stop, talk over each other again, a collision of chatter. Yes, 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. “That is, don’t do much more.” Not for the last time, I’m not exactly sure what she meant.

Follow-Up Film

In any case, in the sequel to Book Club, a follow-up to the 2018 success, Keaton again plays Diane, a woman in her 70s, clumsy, eccentric, fond of men’s tailoring and broad hats. “We stole a bunch of ideas from her life,” says filmmaker 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. “Perhaps ‘Leslie’. But it was by then the second day of shooting.”

In the first film, the bereaved Diane connects with the actor. In the sequel, the four companions go to Italy for Fonda’s bridal shower. Cue big dinners, long sequences (frocks, shops, unclad sculptures), endless double entendre and a remarkably large part for the show’s Hugh Quarshie. And booze. So much booze.

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

Actually, Keaton has put her name to a white and a red variety, but both are designed to be drunk over a glass of ice – not the recommended way of the really hardened wino. Nevertheless, she’s eager to run with the fiction: “Perhaps then I’ll get a different kind 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 stays quiet and drinks.’ Ridiculous!”

Movie’s Focus

The original Book Club made eight times its budget by catering to undercatered over-60s who loved Sex and the City. Its story saw all four women variously affected by reading Fifty Shades of Grey; in this installment, their assigned reading is The Alchemist. It plays a smaller role to the plot. There’s some stuff about destiny. “Not something I ramble on about,” says Keaton, “because it’s all part of it, of what we all deal with.” A gnomic pause. “Moreover, sometimes, it’s quite great.”

What about her character’s big monologue about holding onto youthful hopes? “I’m somewhat addicted to getting in my car and cruising the streets of LA,” she says – once more, 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’re no longer there!”

What makes them so eerie? “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 not that at all! It’s just things going up and down!”

I’m struggling slightly to picture it. Los Angeles is not, after all, a walkable metropolis, unless you’re on your uppers. Anyone on the pavement is noticeable – the actress especially. Do people ever ask what she’s doing? “No, because they don’t care. Generally, 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 secured! You want 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 incarcerated because she tried get inside old stores.’ Yes! I bet.”

Building Aficionado

Actually, Keaton is quite the architecture expert. She’s made more money flipping houses for clients (who include Madonna) than she has making movies. You can tell a lot about a community 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 doors and posted photos of them to Instagram.

“Goodness gracious. I adore doors. Uh-huh. Actually, I’m looking at them right now.” She likes to imagine the comings and goings, “the individuals who lived there or what they sold or why is it vacant? It makes you think about all the facets that pretty much all of us experience. Such as: oh, I did that movie, but the different project was not succeeding very well, but then, you know, something crept in.

“It’s truly interesting that we’re living, that we’re here, and that the majority who are lucky have cars, which take you all over the place. I love my car.”

What type does she have?

“So, I have a [Mercedes] G-wagon. I’m a bitch. I’m fancy. I’m very upscale. It’s black. Yeah. It’s quite nice though. I enjoy 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 remember Mom used to tell me: ‘Diane, avoid that. God, watch out. Focus forward. Don’t start looking around when you’re driving.’ Yes.”

Distinct Character

In case it’s not yet clear, talking with Keaton is like listening to 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 hair dye, and anything more exposing than a roll-neck, creates a dramatic contrast with some of her Book Club co-stars. But most disarming today is how similar she seems from her screen self.

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

One morning, they visited the Sistine Chapel together. “To observe her observe the world is to comprehend who Diane Keaton is,” he says. “She remains truly fascinated. She has all of that texture in her soul.” Even in more ordinary, she’d still be jumping to examine light fittings. “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 modest. That somewhat downplays it. “Perhaps she’d be upset for saying this,” says Holderman, carefully. “She is aware she’s a celebrity, but I don’t think she knows she’s a film icon. She is completely in the moment of her life and existence that to ponder the larger … There’s just 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 won the local crown in the Mrs America competition for accomplished housewives. Watching her honored on stage evoked a mix of pride and jealousy in Keaton, who was eight at the time.

Dorothy was also a productive – and unfulfilled – photographer, collage artist, potter and diarist (85 volumes). Each of Keaton’s memoirs, as well as her writings, are as much about her mother as, say, {starring|appearing