Finally, after 50 years, Charlotte Rampling comes clean about her menage-a-trois with two handsome lovers
Here’s one watching her wed the other!
EVEN by the louche standards of the Swinging Sixties, it was perhaps a step too far.
So when Charlotte Rampling was rumoured to be living in a menage a trois with two handsome lovers, it’s little wonder the rising young star denied it. And continued to deny it as the decades passed, insisting the arrangement was little more than a flat-share.
Yet now, at the age of 75, it seems that the actress is finally willing to confess all, admitting that she did in fact enjoy an unconventional ‘arrangement’ with her agent and another man, a male model.
‘Well, I did have two boyfriends which was racy at the time,’ she told an interviewer. ‘We were all very young. It was all chop and change. Quite a lot of things were experimental.’
Rampling, a colonel’s daughter, was always known to be close to both Bryan Southcombe, her agent and publicist, and model Randall Laurence. But she doggedly ducked the question as to just how close.
Asked now why she failed to address the truth over the years she replied: ‘You still had parents who were quite conventional and you needed to protect them and I didn’t want people in the golf club
‘It was racy at the time... things were experimental’
thinking… you have to keep up appearances, don’t you?’
Photographs from the time show a carefree Rampling happily posing with both men.
When she became pregnant with her son Barnaby, now a successful film-maker, she chose to marry Southcombe. Pictures from their wedding day in 1972 show New Zealand-born Laurence looking on approvingly from the car.
Asked why she chose Southcombe, Rampling told The Guardian: ‘Who knows what life has to offer you? But sometimes choices have to be made and I chose Bryan because I got pregnant. And you will say, “How do you know it was his?” I won’t go any further. But I chose Bryan and Bryan is Barnaby’s father.’
A source who knew bisexual Laurence years later when he was in a relationship with a male model in America told The Mail on Sunday: ‘Randall never made any secret of the fact he was involved with both of them. Randall was always open about his sexuality. It was Charlotte who kept it vague.’
Perhaps Rampling’s candour now is down to the fact that many of the key players are dead.
Southcombe, whom she divorced in 1976 after falling in love with French composer Jean-Michel Jarre, died in 2007.
The friend of Laurence claimed he lived in a hippy ashram in New York state for many years before moving to Hawaii. However, public records in America reveal no trace of him. The source said: ‘I heard he died years ago.’
Rampling found fame at the height of the 1960s in films such as Georgy Girl. Her mother Anne was an heiress to a vast clothing manufacturing fortune, but her childhood had been disrupted by her military father’s constant moves for work and she attended five different schools before the age of 14.
When she declared, at 17, that she wanted to be an actress, her disapproving parents sent her to secretarial college in London, only for the move to backfire when a talent scout spotted her and cast her in a Cadbury’s commercial.
Rampling, who was briefly engaged to Jeremy Lloyd, the late writer of Are You Being Served?, said her carefree life was ‘shattered’ when she was 20 and her 23year-old sister Sarah, who was living in Argentina, shot herself after succumbing to post-natal depression. The tragedy led Rampling to choose ‘dark, overtly sexual films’.
In 1969 she appeared in The Damned, about a young wife sent to a Nazi concentration camp. In 1974’s The Night Porter, she played a concentration camp survivor who embarks on a sadomasochistic relationship with a former SS guard, played by Dirk Bogarde.
He described Rampling as having ‘the Look’, explaining: ‘With those icy-eyes she is capable of a gaze which is both sexual and capable of the most powerful horror.’
Her controversial career continued with Max Mon Amour, in which she has sex with a chimpanzee, and in 1974 she posed naked for Playboy. She has made more than 100 movies, including Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories, Basic Instinct 2 and The Duchess, alongside Keira Knightley, as well as TV shows such as Broadchurch. She was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar in 2015 for 45 Years and was made an OBE in 2000.
Rampling’s marriage to musician Jarre ended in divorce in 1995 after she caught him cheating.
As for her love life now, it remains unconventional. She lives in Paris where she enjoys the company of an unnamed ‘friend’. ‘In France, you can call it amitié amoureuse,’ she explained. ‘The French do have ways of talking about love that the rest of the world don’t. Amitié is friendship, amoureuse is loving. So it’s an “in-love” friendship.’