WHO I AM
Five decades ago, Charlotte Rampling appeared in Bazaar as a dazzling young starlet. Now, in our 150th-anniversary year, she returns to our pages again, with her revealing memoir of the dark truth behind her beautiful smile, and the inner strength that ha
photo-shoot in the Louvre is a privilege – to be photographed in a space that has been dedicated to beauty for centuries. I’ve done it before; I’ve posed in the nude for Juergen Teller, standing by the Mona Lisa. These shots today are compelling; I love the strength of the pose by The Winged Victory, and the juxtaposition of my face with the smooth beauty of the marble statues.
Growing older doesn’t worry me. I’m now into my seventies, and it’s a good feeling: I believe that every time you hit a decade, as long as you don’t resist it or panic, something major happens. There’s always something else around the corner.
Besides, being young isn’t easy. This other picture of me [overleaf], dashingly freckled, was taken almost exactly 50 years ago for Harper’s Bazaar by Bill King to accompany a piece about my Swinging London life. At the time, I was Charley, a dolly bird about town, having fun. I think it’s an unusual image; the angle of the face, and the look – there’s really something going on behind that smile. Which there was: just a few weeks earlier, my sister Sarah had died suddenly in Buenos Aires, after giving birth to a premature baby.
At the time, I believed she had died of a brain haemorrhage. It was only three years later that my father told me the truth, that she had taken her life; he asked me not to tell my mother, and I never did.
Sarah and I had been each other’s closest companions. Our father was in the army, so we travelled constantly and were always having to leave friends behind.
Her death changed the course of my life; it forced me to go deeper. I couldn’t go on with the frivolous lifestyle, or making light-hearted films. Of course, I didn’t talk about it: people didn’t go into their personal lives then. If you had a tragedy, you shut up and got on with it.
So this image shows me on the cusp of a new life. Looking at it, I feel hopeful. I think: a lot of stuff is going to hit that girl but she’s got a great attitude. My attitude is what has saved me throughout my life. I’m optimistic, I believe that there will be light on the horizon. I’ve been through wrenching depression but I’ve somehow always known I’ll come out the other side. I’m strong, like my father – he was physically strong too, an Olympic athlete – and I have a tremendous inner resilience, which has helped me through times of doubt and darkness. Life will go on, and I’ll feel again, and love again. But my mother was fragile, which is why my father asked me not to tell her.
Why did Sarah take her life? You can say it was postnatal depression, but all you really know is that she must have been desperate.
Paradoxically, her death made me realise suicide wasn’t an option. I would have to make it to the end of my life and honour the promise to myself and to my father.
I was crippled with anger – though I didn’t know it. Anger is violent and devouring, and causes great damage. I needed deep, probing analysis to find my way through.
From the start, my work was certainly a form of therapy; I expressed my feelings through my roles in films like The Damned and The Night Porter, and the character I played in François Ozon’s Swimming Pool [2003] was named Sarah after my sister. Perhaps I felt able to let her be with me once more, to acknowledge her, because by then my mother had died and there was no need to keep the secret any longer.
Throughout my career, I have found that my choice of work corresponds to what is going on within. Sometimes I don’t realise why I’m attracted to a subject until afterwards. It’s what happened with The Sense of an Ending. I accepted the role because I loved the director Ritesh Batra, and I was very moved by Julian Barnes’
‘I felt protected, as though angels were holding me. I’ve always believed in invisible forces, and I know they’ve helped me’
book. It was only afterwards that I realised that once again I had been attracted to a screenplay that was about love, loss and memory. As the years go by, the past can develop a really different face.
When I was working on the film, my companion JeanNoël [Tassez] was very ill with a cancer he had been battling with for many months. Right up until the end I thought something would happen to save him. But it was not to be. We finished filming in September, and he died in October.
Very soon after a strange thing happened. The buzz started to mount around 45 Years [the critically acclaimed film about a marriage in crisis, in which Rampling stars opposite Tom Courtenay].
It got stronger and stronger and lo and behold, I was nominated for an Oscar. Being constantly occupied by such a positive event was the best thing that could have happened, and emotionally I felt protected, in a bubble, as though angels were holding me.
I’ve always believed in invisible forces, I feel very connected to them and I know they have helped me. I believe that when a loved one dies, you are looked after by them for quite a long time. You can feel them around you and you help each other. I felt that Jean-Noël stayed with me for several months after his death. Then a friend said: ‘You’ll know when he’s gone,’ and I did. And I knew I could let him go. I knew the time had come.
After the Oscars, I took time out, refused everything, and just spent six months coming to terms with what had happened. Then in August, I went back to my life and work.
I need to work, it’s a wake-up call, a reminder that I’m still a vibrant human being. And I know my fears will creep back if I don’t watch out. I must keep facing them, out there in the world, otherwise the lights will go out.
Recently, I’ve been in Budapest, filming a powerful role in a big Hollywood production with Jennifer Lawrence; and I’ve been on stage in Paris performing Sylvia Plath’s poems – there’s great catharsis there for me in the voice of that woman. And I have been working on the translation of my book. It’s not an autobiography – I’m not interested in anecdotes or telling stories of my life; it’s not that I have anything to hide, it’s just that I want to find other ways of telling my story. I had already pulled out of one publishing deal, and then one day I received a very beautiful, unusual letter from a writer called Christophe Bataille. ‘I’ve got a feeling there’s a book in you,’ he said. So every few months, he would arrive at my apartment and we’d chat a while, and we’d write a few things.
From a very early stage I decided to call it Who I Am; I said to him, with such a title, it will have to reflect the most intimate part of myself. It will have nothing to do with my career and everything to do with what I’ve lived – it’s my childhood. Although it wasn’t a conscious quest to write about my sister, it ended up almost as a poem to her. It was only after I’d finished it that I realised that I felt happier. Lighter somehow.
I’m alone now; but there’s always something new around the corner. I can’t help but be hopeful.
‘Who I Am’ by Charlotte Rampling with Christophe Bataille (£12.99, Icon Books) is published on 2 March. ‘The Sense of an Ending’ is released on 14 April.