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Even before her dog almost dies, 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 wants to talk about entryways. Each response comes filled with qualifications. It’s enjoyable and nerve-wracking – and smart. She wants to escape her own interview.

Hollywood’s Extremely Modest Celebrity

Now 77, Hollywood’s most self-effacing star doesn’t do video calls. Nor does her role in the literary group films, the latest of which begins with her having difficulty to speak via her computer 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 guess I mean: it’s not that bad or anything, but it’s a little odd.” 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 the star laughing at your joke, I’d like to hear it.

A brief silence. “I believe a little goes plenty,” she says. “I mean, don’t do much more.” Not for the last time, I’m not exactly sure what she meant.

Follow-Up Film

Anyway, in the sequel to Book Club, a follow-up to the 2018 success, Keaton again plays Diane, a woman in her 70s, clumsy, quirky, partial to men’s tailoring and wide-brimmed 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 already the second day of shooting.”

In the original movie, the bereaved Diane connects with the actor. In the sequel, the four companions go to Italy for Fonda’s bachelorette party. Expect big dinners, long montages (frocks, shops, naked statues), endless innuendo and a surprisingly big part for Holby City’s Hugh Quarshie. And alcohol. So much booze.

I felt amazed by the drinking, I say; is it true to life? “Oh yeah,” says Keaton enthusiastically. “About six in the morning I’ll have a Lillet, or a chardonnay.” It’s now 11am; how many bottles down is she? “Goodness, maybe 25?”

Actually, Keaton has put her name to a white and a red variety, but both are intended to be drunk over a glass of ice – not the serving suggestion of the truly seasoned wino. Still, she’s eager to embrace the fiction: “Perhaps then I’ll get a different kind of part. ‘I hear Diane Keaton is a big consumer and you can easily influence her. It simplifies things if she just shuts up and drinks.’ Ridiculous!”

Movie’s Focus

The first Book Club made eight times its cost by catering to overlooked over-60s who adored Sex and the City. Its plot saw all four women variously shaken by reading Fifty Shades of Grey; in this installment, their assigned reading is The Alchemist. It’s less integral to the plot. There’s some stuff about fatalism. “Nothing I dwell about,” says Keaton, “because it’s an aspect of it, of what we all deal with.” A gnomic pause. “Moreover, sometimes, it’s kind of great.”

What about her character’s big speech about hanging on to 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. “Which most people avoid any more. And then getting out and snapping pictures of these stores and structures that have been just decimated. They aren’t there!”

What makes them so haunting? “Because life is haunting! You have 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. Los Angeles is not, after all, a walkable metropolis, unless you’re on your uppers. Anybody on the sidewalk stands out – Diane Keaton especially. Do people 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 sneak into one of the buildings? “No, I couldn’t. Goodness, I’d be arrested because they’re secured! Are you hoping me to go to jail? That would be better for you. You can use this: ‘I spoke to Diane Keaton but then I heard she got incarcerated cause she tried get inside old stores.’ Yeah! I imagine.”

Building Aficionado

In reality, Keaton is quite the architecture expert. She has earned more money flipping houses for clients (who include Madonna) than she has making movies. One can discern a lot about a community through its urban planning, she says.: “I believe they’re more present in Italy. They’re 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.

“Oh, my God. I adore doors. Yes. In fact, I’m looking 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 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 succeeding very well, but then, you know, something snuck in.

“It’s just so interesting that we’re living, that we’re here, and that the majority who are fortunate have cars, which transport 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 luxurious. I’m really fancy. It’s black. Yes. It’s pretty good though. I like it.”

Does she go fast? “No. What I prefer to do is observe, so I can get in trouble with that, when I neglect the road, I recall Mom used to tell me: ‘Diane, don’t do that. Heavens, watch out. Look ahead. Don’t start gazing about when you’re driving.’ Yes.”

Distinct Character

If it’s not yet clear, speaking to Keaton is like hearing unused clips from Annie Hall sent via carrier pigeon. She’s a unique actor in so many ways – her aversion to plastic procedures, for instance, and coloring, and anything more exposing than a turtleneck, makes for 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 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 person and as an actor.”

One morning, they visited the Sistine Chapel together. “To watch her study the world is to comprehend who Diane Keaton is,” he says. “She remains genuinely fascinated. She has all of that texture in her soul.” Even somewhere more ordinary, she’d still be hopping up to examine fixtures. “A lot of people who have that creative instinct, as they get older, become self-aware.” Somehow, he says, she hasn’t.

Keaton is generally described as modest. That somewhat underplays it. “Maybe she’d be upset for saying this,” says Holderman, carefully. “She knows she’s a celebrity, but I don’t believe she knows she’s a movie star. She’s just so in the moment of her life and existence 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. Dad was an estate agent, her mother won the local crown in the Mrs America contest for skilled housewives. Watching her honored on stage evoked a mix of pride and envy in Keaton, who was eight at the time.

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