Sexy ice queen Rampling thaws, a little, to tell her tale
SOME of the most beautiful creatures who ever lived blossomed in the Sixties — Julie Christie, Susannah York, Jane Asher, Marianne Faithfull, Jacqueline Bisset and Charlotte Rampling.
Strutting about in thigh-high white boots and leaping out of open-top cars, these girls were photographic models for David Bailey, Lord Snowdon and Terry O’Neill.
‘Everything was different,’ writes Charlotte — Charly — Rampling in this haunting and disturbing memoir. ‘Skirts, music, objects, language, freedom . . .’
And was there ever a more onomatopoetic name than Rampling? The word is evocative of romps in the hay, but Rampling was the Sixties’ ice queen, peerless at playing cool bitches. She is complicated in Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories, disturbing in The Night Porter.
Now of more mature years, her blue eyes undimmed, she is good at being imperious — as the angry wife in the award-winning 45 Years or the lawyer in Broadchurch.
Who I Am explains precisely how she grew to be as she is, with a personality that is deliberately detached, her touch of frost consciously kept up.
Lapsing into the third person, Rampling says of herself: ‘I feel a little afraid of your intelligence, of your challenging gaze.’ She is aware that if ‘people come closer’, it doesn’t take long before they get the message and ‘they back away’.
Born in 1946, everything can be traced back to her army childhood. She moved seven times in her first 13 years. Her father, Godfrey Rampling, was a Colonel in the British army’s Royal Artillery, attached to NATO, and was posted everywhere from Malta to Gibraltar.
‘Army life was regimented down to the last detail.’
This meant not showing emotion when the family was uprooted yet again.
The family, well off after owning factories that made ecclesiastical clothes and military uniforms for 200 years, were not fun at the best of times.
The Colonel had won a gold medal for the 400m relay at the Berlin Olympics in 1936, but he could never curb a ‘rage to win’. We are to believe he’d never got over the trauma of losing his parents in World
War I, after which he was brought up by his grandmother, ‘a severe woman’, who consigned him to boarding school aged seven.
Rampling’s mother, Isabel, was livelier. She wrote voluminous diaries in purple ink, enjoyed parties and wore expensive frocks and perfume.
As a youngster, Rampling and her sister, Sarah, another beauty, were flung together for company. Sarah was always troubled. ‘She used to get up at night and sleepwalk along the corridors, haunted by dreams.’
On Sarah’s first trip abroad, ‘a spirited girl throwing off the shackles of convention’, she met a handsome Argentinian cattle-rancher. ‘Without saying anything to anyone, a week after meeting him, she married him.’
Within a year, Sarah had died, apparently in childbirth. Years later, Rampling discovered she had committed suicide — another subject the Colonel never mentioned as: ‘It would kill your mother if she knew.’
There was no funeral. By the time the Ramplings were informed, Sarah had been buried — ‘because of the heat’.
This elegant book describes itself as ‘not a biography, or a song, or a betrayal, barely a novel — let’s say a ballad’.
Though Who I Am is a tiny production, it is intricate, and I needed a lot of patience to piece together any coherent narrative. Rampling says her father’s sole confession was: ‘If I had to start over, I’d be an actor’ — the magic profession for those who want to escape from themselves.
That was why she chose performing also: to go on stage, to be looked at and applauded gave her an ‘unsettling, thrilling feeling’.
More unsettling than thrilling, perhaps. ‘It must be hard being Charlotte Rampling,’ she concludes about herself.
It is impossible to disagree.