Oscar finally notices Charlotte Rampling
British actress, 69, nominated for role in sci-fi film, 45 Years
Charlotte Rampling’s Academy Award nomination for best actress in 45 Years caught many forecasters off guard, given that the British actress — who turns 70 next month and who had never been nominated — somehow escaped the notice of the Golden Globes, a traditional predictor of Academy tastes.
But some who have seen the film have been less surprised. Early reviews of 45 Years have been almost universally raves, giving the film a score on the review-aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes that is higher than even that of Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
That is, perhaps, an unfair comparison. While that sci-fi adventure concerns the fate of planets, 45 Years merely revolves around Kate (Rampling), a British country housewife whose comfortable marriage, on the eve of her 45th wedding anniversary, is shaken to the core by a cascading series of small revelations concerning an earlier relationship between her husband, Geoff (Tom Courtenay), and a former girlfriend.
Based on a short story by David Constantine, 45 Years is a quiet, closely observed study of Kate’s weeklong “unravelling,” according to writer-director Andrew Haigh ( Weekend).
“It’s not just about ‘Here’s some information that she didn’t know,’ ” Haigh said by phone from Los Angeles, where he was working on HBO’s Looking. “In many respects, the movie is about not even knowing the truth about oneself.”
The sense of dramatic discovery — both for the actress and for her audience — is an essential ingredient in every role Rampling takes. In the 2011 documentary Charlotte Rampling: The Look, she spoke of her approach to acting, likening it to performing without a net. “I don’t know what’s going to happen, and I don’t want to know.”
Over the course of her sometimes con- troversial 50-year career — just the other day she came under fire for her comment that the #OscarsSoWhite controversy was, perhaps, “racist to white people” — Rampling has played a haughty and suddenly pregnant ice queen contemplating a choice between abortion and marriage ( Georgy Girl), a concentration camp survivor involved in a sado-masochistic affair with a former Nazi ( The Night Porter) and a married woman who takes a chimpanzee as her lover ( Max Mon Amour).
It’s all par for the course for Rampling, whom Haigh calls a “movie star,” but one with highly eccentric tastes and a nontraditional charisma. “She has this strange, otherworldly quality that keeps you gripped by her,” the director said.
Rampling describes Kate’s journey in 45 Years as a process of “excavation,” in which unexpected emotions are unearthed.
Rather than inhabiting a role, as many actors do, Rampling said she “carried Kate inside” her, giving herself over to the character’s guidance.
“Only Kate will know what she has to do,” Rampling said by phone from Paris, where she lives, “and I will not know what it is.”
Rampling, who was born in a small Essex village, is hardly a simple English countrywoman. Yet she says she knows women like Kate.
“At heart, I am an English middle-class woman. All my cousins and my aunts, all the people around my family — of course, they’re very different from me — but I’ve been observing them all my life. The people of my family all live like Kate. It was probably the reason I left England and went to travel to other countries. I couldn’t penetrate this thing in the English psyche.” 45 Years is now playing in Toronto.