Diane Keaton: the pigeons of London kept my spirits aloft

HER friend Woody Allen famously dubbed them “rats with wings” in his 1980 film Stardust Memories, but the actress Diane Keaton reveals that she had a secret fondness for pigeons because the flocks in Trafalgar Square took her mind off a difficult role that she was filming in the UK that year.

The Oscar-winning star was then playing opposite Warren Beatty in his Russian Revolution epic Reds. She recalls: “The pigeons of Trafalgar Square helped distract me from the challenging duties of playing Louise Bryant, a journalist who became known for her sympathetic coverage of Russia’s political character during the First World War.”

She adds: “I’m not sure why I began taking pictures of the pigeons. It might have been due to their constant manic swooping down on hundreds of tourists. They were astonishingly reckless, yet completely in control. I had to admire their wilful plunges that occasionally landed on some hysterical teenager or crying baby.”

On her weekends off from filming, she watched crowds feed “the divebombing birds”. The distraction clearly helped because her performance in Reds was nominated for an Oscar.

Now, at the age of 76, her recollections and photographs of those birds appear in a book, titled Saved: My Picture World, a “scrapbook of her fascinations and reflections”. It will be published next month by Rizzoli, which describes it as a “glimpse into the mind of the legendary film star”.

Eager pigeons dive-bomb a victim who had come to feed them in Trafalgar Square, a picture taken by Diane Keaton and reproduced in her book