‘I am an animal who needs a mate’
Two years after losing her partner, Charlotte Rampling reveals to Celia Walden she’s yearning for someone new
‘No, no, no, no… No.” Coming from Charlotte Rampling, this could be daunting. But these are only low-voiced protests – muttered through bouts of laughter – at my suggestion the 71-year-old join the dating app Tinder. “So you’re saying I could effectively call the guards and say: ‘Could you bring me a man because I really need someone in my life?’” “Pretty much.” I pull out a recent statistic about online partnerships being 25 per cent more likely to last. “Is that true?” she asks, her hooded eyes betraying a kind of lazy incredulity. “How wonderful. The Tinder fairy tale. Perhaps we could even make a documentary about it? ‘Charlotte Rampling Joins Tinder.’”
Much as I’d love to do this, I suspect the star who was nominated for an Oscar for 45 Years might prefer a more organic courtship. But two years after losing her long-time partner Jean-noël Tassez to cancer, Rampling is clear about one thing: “I want somebody to love. For the first time since Jean-noël died, I’m yearning to build something with someone new. I know a lot of women who have experienced loss might just think ‘enough’, because falling in love is quite a violent thing. It’s fantastic but also painful because everything is so alive. And when you’ve got your own life and suddenly somebody barges in and throws everything around…” she shrugs. “It’s not easy. But I want all that again. I’m an animal that needs a mate, and I know it’s going to happen because I really want it to.”
All of this is unexpected: the vulnerability of this lithe woman in black crepe trousers oozing selfassurance; the optimism from someone life has kicked in the face more than once; and the candour from a screen legend whose inscrutability has seduced audiences for over 50 years. This is a woman so reluctant to let the world into her life that even her recently published autobiography tells us very little about her. Who I Am – Rampling’s impressionistic memoir, written with Christophe Bataille – is the reason I am sitting in the actress’s magnificent 1930s Parisian apartment. The book is short and poignant and tells us nothing about Rampling’s rise from gorgeous typist, scouted on the streets of London at 17 for a Cadbury chocolate commercial, to Royal Court drama student. It tells us nothing about her taboo-busting career, kicked off by the cult classic The Night Porter, or the many iconic directors she has worked with, from Luchino Visconti (The Damned, 1969) to Woody Allen (Stardust Memories, 1980) and François Ozon (Under the Sand, 2000, and Swimming Pool, 2003) to Lars von Trier (Melancholia, 2011). It tells us nothing, either, about her two marriages, to former press agent Bryan Southcombe, and Jean-michel Jarre, which ended acrimoniously after 20 years when the musician had an affair.
The book focuses instead on her childhood in Sturmer, Essex, back when the daughter of an Olympic gold medallist army officer and a manufacturing heiress was still Tessa (her first name), and she and her older sister Sarah were being moved around from Fontainebleau and Provence back to England – with a brief spell as teenage cabaret singers in London.
The tone is light until Sarah marries an Argentinian rancher and
moves to Buenos Aires, where she shoots herself at 23, days after giving birth to a son. Rampling’s mother was so traumatised that she suffered a stroke from which she never recovered.
“Only right at the end did the book come to be about Sarah,” muses Rampling. “I really didn’t know what I was going to write. And I wasn’t sure how to end it until my son gave me the ending.” Having travelled to Buenos Aires to meet Sarah’s son, Carlos, David rang from his aunt’s grave – a place Rampling has never been able to bring herself to visit. “When he called to tell me that he was sitting next to Sarah it was this outstanding moment. Because he’d done it for me.”
The writing process has been so therapeutic that Rampling is considering doing it again. But
always with the help of another writer who might be able to say the things she can’t or won’t. Bataille writes for example: “How tired you are of being stared at and desired?” Is that really how she feels?
“It is frightening always to be observed, and I was from very early on because I was pretty and in the public eye and I became sort of an It girl in the Sixties. But what these girls go through now is much worse. We weren’t constantly thinking about our own image. It was lovely, actually: we were like young colts who were told to just ‘go and gallop’, and so off we all galloped, even though we didn’t know where we were going. Now these girls just have one goal and that’s to have an image: they want celebrity, they want to be on the red carpet; they want to ‘be there’. But where?”
Did Rampling ever feel that people couldn’t see past her looks? “They don’t get in the way, but they are very
prominent,” she replies, and I admire her use of the present tense. “You are where you are – to an extent – because of your looks. So all these people who say: ‘Oh no, it’s not because of my looks’ – it is, trust me. But what you do with your looks, whether you use them for power or just to have fun, that’s up to you.”
Has she enjoyed hers? “It’s a complicated one, because it’s a God-given gift and you’ve done nothing to deserve it. So one day you wake up and you have a beautiful face and a beautiful figure and everyone is looking at you. And then you’re propelled somewhere faster than you probably should be because of that beauty.” She frowns. “You’re set apart. You’ll never be the same as the rest, so it’s almost like you’re a different religion, race or colour.”
In her 2011 documentary The Look, there is section called “Ageing” in which Rampling says that panic is the
key thing women must avoid as they get older. When I mention this she laughs and intones, soothsayer-like: “‘Don’t panic, but you are going to die’.”
Has she ever even considered fighting the ageing process? “My face could do with having a few things done to it but I won’t touch it. I can still bear to look at myself, and you know what? I’d like to see my face get very old. I’m curious to see where it’ll go,” she says, chuckling. “Although I’d probably look ‘prettier’ without great heavy lines and with it all tightly pulled back, that’s not what I want to look like.”
Ultimately it’s about feeling good in your own skin. Which Rampling does as much now as she did at 63, when she posed naked beside the Mona Lisa for photographer Juergen Teller. “Nudity can be empowering in an artistic context. You can say it was disgraceful and we were showing off, but you can’t deny it was a powerful image,” she says. Besides which, she adds, women shouldn’t be forced to cover up simply because they are no longer 20.
I could spend all afternoon with this warm, clever and funny woman but Rampling has things to do and, as she shows me out, I have one last question. This man she’s not going to meet on Tinder – would she prefer him to be French or British? “I’m not putting any conditions on it,” she replies. “Let’s just leave it open, shall we?”
Who I Am by Charlotte Rampling and Christophe Bataille is published by Icon (£12.99). To order your copy for £10.99 plus p&p call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk
The actress will be in conversation with Sarfraz Manzoor at the Hay Festival today at 4pm.