DIANE KEATON ON LOVE
THE UNCONVENTIONAL STAR TALKS ABOUT HER IDEAL RELATIONSHIP
The Annie Hall actress tells why relationships aren’t for her
Forty-five years after making an unforgettable impression in The Godfather and 40 years after winning our hearts in Annie Hall, Academy Award winner, comedy genius and style icon Diane Keaton is giving us a private audience in the suite of a hotel in central London.
Over the course of an hour, we get the full Diane – the exquisite timing, the dramatic pauses, the droll shrug, the sotto voice and the under-the-eyelashes withering glance.
And then there’s the sense that her mind is somewhere else completely, probably buried deep in a photography book in a store in Greenwich Village.
Plus, she’s wearing a hat – a cream fedora – which is what you want from Diane (71). Also a Céline shirt with a wing collar and black high-waisted trousers that swoosh over high heels. The look is finished with more than half a dozen large silver crucifixes she’s picked up at a flea market over the years. Like we said, The Full Diane.
As she pulls answers out of the air, switches from high energy to reverie, clinks her bracelets and fidgets with her black onyx rings, you just want to sit right there and watch. Which is presumably the reason why she’s had a near half-century Hollywood career playing the woman-girl it’s impossible not to fall for. Since she was in her twenties, she’s played in love at every age on the big screen.
“Yeah, think about that!” she snaps. “With all kinds of men. It’s been fabulous! It’s the perfect relationship. I don’t have to have the relationship, but we tell these stories and then they leave. Perfect! I’ve got to play around with all different kinds of men.”
This month, the actress plays around with Brendan Gleeson in Hampstead, an unlikely romance set in the swankiest of London enclaves. It’s a love story that traverses the ground between NottingHill and Something’s Gotta Give, with Diane’s widow Emily feeling down in the dumps and past her prime when she encounters Brendan’s Donald Horner, an Irish recluse who has been squatting for 17 years in a shack on Hampstead Heath and is about to be evicted. In him, Emily sees the opportunity to give her heart to both a cause and another person.
“Well, I mean, it just gives hope!” she exclaims about her reasons for taking on the movie. “To people who are alone or they’ve fallen apart,
or they’ve got older or their husband dies and you found out that he cheated on you and you owe money. And you’re lying to everyone and you’re not really friends with Lesley Manville...”
Lesley plays Emily’s neighbour and number-one frenemy in a cast that includes a host of national-treasure types from Jason Watkins (last seen attempting to saw up Thandie Newton in Line of Duty) to James Norton (“He’s the next James Bond, right? Well, I mean he should be,” says Diane wryly) and Simon Callow.
The film is based on the true story of Harry Hallowes, a man who did indeed set up home on the heath, although a quick compare-and-contrast confirms that the real shack was not the tumbling-rose, shabby-chic idyll – filled with books and candles in wine bottles – that the film conjures up. But how else to lure the cultured, enviably clothed Miss Emily, as Donald calls her in some strange feudal throwback?
Emily and Donald embody the old-fashioned essence of romantic comedy – opposites. A concept that Diane always sees the draw in.
“Oh, yeah, I think your opposite stirs you into something. They shake you up and that always is attractive.” Pause. “For a while,” she laughs. “But you want to be companions. You want to enjoy yourself with that person without having conflict all the time. Conflict can be sexy, but it’s exhausting.” So what’s her idea of a good real-life relationship? “Well,” she says, dropping her voice and looking directly at us through her spectacles. “You’re talkin’ to the wrong person.”
Though she’s played love and been in love with some of the most famous men in the world – Woody Allen, Warren Beatty and Al Pacino – Diane has never committed to anyone for long enough to permanently change her relationship status.
“You know, my father was a ‘greeter’,” she says by way of explanation. She puts out her hand and pulls on a Jack Nicholson grin. ‘Jack Hall!’ he’d say.
“Charming, great smile. But he could only sustain it for a short time. And I remember Warren said to me when I was with him, ‘You know, you’d make a great politician. You can do it for a coupla hours and then you gotta get out.’ And he’s dead-on right. I couldn’t sustain things that were more personal.”
She refers to her late parents a lot, particularly in relation to the characteristics she inherited from them. “They weren’t very social people. And that used to worry me when I was younger. ‘Gee, why aren’t there more people around?’ And now I’m totally them because I don’t want it for very long. Warren nailed it!”
Nevertheless, Diane realised she did want another kind of connection and adopted her daughter Dexter, now 21, and later her son Duke (16). “Well, I figured I had to do something because, you know, what was I doing at 50? I was just being.”
She was lonely? “I was worried about what my engagement would be with people in the future. Was I going to be engaged enough? And of course the kids forced that engagement. With kids, you’re right back there in the middle of it.”
In Hampstead, Diane says she identified immediately with the character of Emily and her confusion about life. “Both of them are so stuck. He can’t just stay in that shack for another 15 years – what is he thinking? And she is passive and stuck, and doesn’t know what to do. Many people do feel stuck in their lives and they don’t know how to make a change. And not only that, they don’t want to address it because it’s too scary.”
It’s hard to believe that a woman with such a diverse career and life as Diane – a woman who has not only appeared in more than 45 films, but written seven books (her latest, The House that Pinterest Built, about her new home, is published by Rizzoli in October), been a photographer, had a string of high-profile relationships, started a wine label and brought up two kids by herself – could possibly identify with “stuck”. She seems always to be embarking on a new adventure.
Diane looks away, then looks down with a smile. “Yeah, but I’m not really. Not really.”
Born Diane Hall, she was brought up by Jack and Dorothy in Highland Park,
Los Angeles, along with two sisters and a brother.
Her father studied to be an engineer when the kids were little and, when Diane was eight, her mother won an all-American, all-1950s-style competition for the best local wife. Seeing her mother – “she was great looking” – up on the stage at the local theatre surrounded by “a cornucopia of gifts” was the catalyst for a career in the spotlight. “I wanted those gifts, I wanted to be up on that stage,” she says. “Although, turns out I didn’t want to be on stage, but I did want to act.”
Success, she says, came because she was lucky enough to find Sandford Meisner, an acting teacher whose technique suited her and who encouraged that loose, naturalistic style that is so identifiably Diane.
“It was about just being in the moment with your partner,” she tells. “It’s all about the person you’re acting with and paying attention to them. It’s not just about telling the story but experiencing it through your responses to them. But it can get a little sloppy, a little stuttery.”
You don’t really see that style
‘ You want to be companions. You want to enjoy yourself with that person without having conflict all the time’
from Diane in her first major film, The Godfather, in 1972. She says she never understood why Francis Ford Coppola cast her in it until she watched it again at the recent anniversary celebrations in New York’s Radio City Music Hall, with the original cast present.
“There were 6000 people there and seven of us up on stage – De Niro, Pacino, Jimmy Caan, Robert Duvall, Talia Shire, Francis and myself. You know, I don’t really know them, but it was fascinating to hear Francis speak.”
She thought she was a weird choice because she was known “and even Francis had said it as an eccentric. But watching those first few scenes with Al and I shopping or at the wedding, I see that we’re on the outskirts and we’re kind of the people that aren’t ‘in’.
“So it was good casting because I had no voice at that time in my life, in that movie. I was overwhelmed by this big world and didn’t know what to make of it.
And I look so weird!”
She says the film did nothing for her career, but when Woody Allen cast her in Annie Hall, for which she won an Oscar, everything changed. “Oh, yeah. Annie Hall changed my life. Because when Woody said, ‘Just dress like you do,’ it was the gift of all time. It was the greatest gift. Now he makes fun of me. He thinks I’m a freak. But that’s our relationship. I tell him what I think of him too.”
With her choice of mannish trousers and waistcoats, teamed with that scatty, chatty style of acting and Woody’s script, Diane created one of the most magical screen characters in movie history, right up there with Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
Her style was so key, but she brushes off the idea that it was somehow special. “It was just developing all the time, from the street but also fashion. I mean in the 1970s, Comme des Garçons – I would go and stare in the windows. Romeo Gigli, he had a flair for tailoring. I liked Ralph Lauren early on too. Because that look gives me a body. I’m kind of like that – straight up and down
– so I love it.”
Then and now she makes covered-up look sexy, I say, thinking about the roll-neck tops that have become her trademark and which Jack Nicholson famously scissored off in Something’s Gotta Give.
“I’ve always been quite covered up – oh, yes. I believe in that! The other person I think is the genius of all for covering up is Karl Lagerfeld. I feel like I should meet him. I’m sure he wouldn’t like my style. He looks good, man! Spectacular. So
I like to think of myself as the female Karl Lagerfeld.” And she has a good laugh at that.