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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’d emailed questions but she hasn’t read them. She wants to talk about doors. Every answer comes filled with caveats. It’s fun and stressful – and smart. She wants to evade her own interview.

Hollywood’s Most Self-Effacing Celebrity

Currently 77, Hollywood’s most self-effacing star avoids video calls. Nor does her character in the literary group films, the latest of which starts with her struggling to speak via her laptop to best friends 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 bit unusual.” We converse, 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 brief silence. “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, bumbling, quirky, partial to men’s tailoring and broad hats. “We borrowed 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 original movie, the bereaved Diane hooks up with the actor. In the sequel, the four friends go to Italy for Fonda’s bachelorette party. Expect big dinners, long montages (frocks, shops, naked statues), endless double entendre and a remarkably large 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? “Absolutely,” says Keaton gamely. “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 launched a white and a red variety, but both are intended to be drunk over a tumbler of ice – not the recommended way of the really hardened wino. Still, she’s keen to embrace the fiction: “Maybe then I’ll get a new type of part. ‘I hear 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.’ Absurd!”

Movie’s Focus

The first Book Club made 8x its cost by serving overlooked over-60s who adored Sex and the City. Its story saw all four women variously shaken by reading Fifty Shades of Grey; this time round, their homework is The Alchemist. It plays a smaller role to the plot. There’s some stuff about fatalism. “Nothing I ramble on about,” says Keaton, “because it’s all part of it, of what we all deal with.” A cryptic silence. “And then, sometimes, it’s quite great.”

Regarding her character’s big speech about holding onto youthful hopes? “I’m sort of addicted to getting in my car and driving through the streets of LA,” she says – again, a bit tangentially. “A habit most people avoid any more. And then getting out and snapping pictures of these shops and structures that have been just decimated. They’re no longer there!”

What makes them so eerie? “Because life 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 fluctuating!”

I find it hard slightly to picture it. Los Angeles is not, after all, a walkable metropolis, unless you’re on your uppers. Anybody on the pavement is noticeable – Diane Keaton particularly. Do people ever ask what she is up to? “No, because they don’t care. Generally, they’re just in a rush and they’re not looking.”

Has she ever snuck inside one of the buildings? “Oh, I can’t. My God, I’d be thrown in jail because they’re locked up! You want me to go to jail? That’d be better for you. You can use this: ‘I spoke to Diane Keaton but then I heard she got thrown in jail because she tried enter old stores.’ Yes! I bet.”

Architecture Expert

In reality, Keaton is a true architecture expert. She’s made more money renovating properties for patrons (who include Madonna) than she has making movies. One can discern a lot about a community through its city design, she says.: “I think 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 posted photos of them to Instagram.

“Goodness gracious. I adore doors. Uh-huh. In fact, I’m gazing 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 facets that pretty much all of us go through. Like: oh, I did that movie, but the different project was not succeeding very well, but then, y’know, something snuck in.

“It’s just so interesting that we’re alive, 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?

“Well, I have a [Mercedes] G-wagon. I’m a bitch. I’m fancy. I’m very upscale. It’s a black car. Yes. It’s pretty good though. I enjoy it.”

Is she a speeder? “No. What I like to do is look, so I can have issues with that, when I neglect the road, I recall Mom used to tell me: ‘Diane, don’t do that. God, watch out. Focus forward. Don’t begin gazing about when you’re driving.’ Yes.”

Distinct Character

If it’s not yet clear, talking with Keaton is like listening to outtakes from Annie Hall sent via carrier pigeon. She’s a singular actor in so many ways – her aversion to cosmetic surgery, 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 disarming today is how indistinguishable she seems from her on-screen persona.

“I think the degree of overlap in the Venn diagram 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 is relentlessly in the moment, as a human and as an artist.”

On a particular day, they toured the Sistine Chapel together. “To observe her observe the world is to comprehend who Diane Keaton is,” he says. “She remains truly fascinated. She possesses all of that texture in her being.” Even in more ordinary, she’d still be jumping to examine light fittings. “A lot of people who have that creative instinct, as they get older, become conscious of themselves.” In some way, he says, she has not.

Keaton is usually described as modest. That somewhat underplays it. “Maybe she’d be upset for saying this,” says Holderman, carefully. “She knows 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 ponder the larger … There is no time or space for it.”

Early Life

Keaton was delivered in an LA suburb in 1946, the first of four children for Dorothy and Jack Hall. Dad was an real estate broker, her mother earned the regional title in the Mrs America contest for skilled housewives. Seeing her honored on stage evoked a mix of satisfaction and envy in Keaton, who was eight at the time.

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