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Right before her dog almost dies, my call with the acclaimed actress is chaotic. There’s a delay on the line. Conversation stops and starts like a delivery truck. I had sent questions but she didn’t review them. She desires to talk about doors. Each response comes stacked with caveats. It’s enjoyable and nerve-wracking – and smart. She wants to escape her own interview.

Hollywood’s Most Self-Effacing Celebrity

Now 77, Hollywood’s most humble star doesn’t do video calls. Nor does her character in the literary group films, the latest of which begins 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, 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 Diane Keaton laughing at your joke, I’d like to hear it.

A brief silence. “I believe a little goes plenty,” she says. “That is, don’t do much more.” Once again, 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 again plays Diane, a woman in her 70s, bumbling, quirky, fond of men’s tailoring and wide-brimmed hats. “We borrowed 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. “Something like ‘Leslie’. But it was already the second day of shooting.”

In the first film, the widowed Diane hooks up with Andy García. In the follow-up, the four companions go to Italy for Fonda’s bachelorette party. Expect big dinners, long sequences (dresses, shops, unclad sculptures), endless innuendo and a remarkably large part for Holby City’s Hugh Quarshie. And booze. So much drink.

I felt amazed by the drinking, I say; is it accurate? “Oh yeah,” says Keaton enthusiastically. “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 launched a white blend and a red, but both are designed to be drunk over a tumbler of ice – not the serving suggestion of the truly seasoned wino. Nevertheless, she’s keen to embrace the fiction: “Maybe then I’ll get a different kind of part. ‘They say Diane Keaton is a big consumer and you can really push her around. It makes it much easier if she just shuts up and drinks.’ Ridiculous!”

Film’s Theme

The original 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 differently shaken 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. “Not something 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 quite great.”

Regarding 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 tangentially. “Which most people don’t do any more. And then getting out and snapping pictures of these shops and buildings that have been just decimated. They’re no longer there!”

What makes them so eerie? “Because existence is unsettling! You have 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 find it hard slightly to picture it. LA is not, ultimately, a walkable metropolis, unless you’re on your last legs. Anybody on the pavement stands out – Diane Keaton 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 rush and they’re not looking.”

Did she ever sneak into one of the buildings? “Oh, I can’t. Goodness, I’d be arrested because they’re locked up! You want me to go to jail? That’d be better for you. You could write: ‘I was talking to Diane Keaton but then I heard she got incarcerated cause she tried get inside old stores.’ Yes! I imagine.”

Architecture Expert

Actually, Keaton is a true architecture expert. She has earned more money renovating properties for clients (who include Madonna) than she has making movies. One can discern a lot about a society 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 less frantic.” While filming, she saw a lot of doors and shared photos of them to Instagram.

“Oh, my God. Oh, I love doors. Yes. In fact, I’m looking at them right now.” She likes to imagine the exits and entrances, “the individuals who lived there or what they offered or why is it empty? It makes you think about all the facets that pretty much all of us go through. Such as: oh, I did that movie, but the other one was not succeeding very well, but then, y’know, something snuck in.

“It’s truly 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 adore my car.”

What type does she have?

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

Does she go fast? “No. What I like to do is observe, 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 start gazing about when you’re driving.’ Yeah.”

Distinct Character

In case it’s not yet clear, talking with Keaton is like listening to unused clips from the classic film sent via carrier pigeon. She’s a singular actor in so many ways – her dislike to cosmetic surgery, for instance, and coloring, and anything more revealing than a roll-neck, makes for a dramatic contrast with some of her film co-stars. But most charming today is how similar she seems from her on-screen persona.

“I believe the degree of similarity in the comparison of Diane as a person and Diane as an performer,” 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 person and as an actor.”

One morning, they toured the Sistine Chapel together. “To observe her study the world is to comprehend who Diane Keaton is,” he says. “She remains genuinely fascinated. She has all of that depth in her being.” Even in 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 has not.

Keaton is usually described as modest. That somewhat downplays it. “Maybe 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 is completely in the moment of her life and existence that to reflect on the larger … There is no time or space for it.”

Early Life

Keaton was born in an LA outskirt in 1946, the eldest of four kids for Dorothy and Jack Hall. Her father was an real estate broker, her mother won the regional title in the Mrs America contest for skilled 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 – photographer, collagist, potter and diarist (85 volumes). Each of Keaton’s memoirs, as well as her essay collection, are as much about her mother as, for example, {starring|appearing