Charlotte Rampling: 'I'm exotic, and I like that'

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/dec/20/-sp-charlotte-rampling-im-exotic-and-i-like-that

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Not long ago, at home in Paris, Charlotte Rampling switched on the old movie channel she watches all the time, the way some people leave the radio on. She saw that one of her films was playing. Max Mon Amour (1986) is the story of a diplomat’s wife, Margaret, who has an affair with a chimpanzee, Max. There’s a scene in which the pair are discovered in bed together, Max concealed beneath the white covers as the husband rages through the bedroom door; another when Max joins a formal dinner party, only to be dismissed in disgrace after covering Margaret with apey kisses. Rampling plays Margaret without a trace of self-consciousness, even as Max hooks his hairy arms around her neck and nuzzles in for a snog.

When she saw the movie was on, Rampling couldn’t help herself. She sat through the whole thing, on her own. “And it was fantastic. I thought, ‘This is such a good film.’” She was breaking a long-held rule: “You do not look.”

Rampling, sitting in a near-silent cafe off Brick Lane in east London, booms as she repeats this. She adopts this instructive tone every now and then, like someone who has hit Caps Lock by mistake. “You shouldn’t have a relationship with your image,” she says. “YOU SHOULD NOT. Since the beginning, I’ve said, ‘I’m not going to get involved with my image.’” This from a woman who has just emerged – hair blown off her sharp-angled face, eyes ringed in black – from having her photograph taken, a photograph to add to five decades’ worth of photographs, and 100-odd films and TV series.

Rampling, 68, was the first to pose nude for Helmut Newton, in 1973, and 30 years later clutched Juergen Teller to her breast in a campaign for Marc Jacobs. But the commandment has stuck: Do Not Look. Just a glance to check the picture’s OK, maybe, but that’s all. “You just glimpse,” she says. “You don’t go into it.” That way narcissism lies. “It’s selfie selfie selfie, Facebook Facebook Facebook, Facetime Facetime Facetime.” She looks crushingly serious as she says this. “I don’t know where the fuck that can go, other than just being very empty.”

This is the old-fashioned, common-sense Rampling talking – daughter to Isabel, a painter, and Godfrey, a lieutenant-colonel in the Royal Artillery and an ex-Olympic sprinter. This is Rampling the archetypal postwar Brit (she was born in 1946). She has now lived in Paris longer than she lived in London, but in the past few years has made a tentative return – not to live, but to work. In 2012, she played a retired spy in Restless, the TV adaptation of the William Boyd novel, and gently reminded British directors of her existence. Soon, she’ll appear in the second series of ITV hit Broadchurch. Nothing says you’re home more than a role in a seaside murder mystery featuring emotionally tortured cops and an ex-alcoholic vicar.

Her role – even her character’s name – in Broadchurch is a comically strict secret. The plot is being protected as ferociously as the nuclear codes, and Rampling can say precisely nothing about any of it. So she talks instead in elegant generalities: “It’s a very real, honest tale of people’s lives, very cinematographic – so it’s beautifully shot. You just get very involved with these people.”

But village life… it’s not very Rampling. The idea of living in a cosy little town, where you know everyone and they all know you, where you can’t walk down the street without someone saying a cheery hello. Could she do it? “I’d rather do it in a film, I must say. But at the same time, I rather love the idea of it. There’s a kind of human yearning in wanting to belong, and we all feel more or less insecure about that as human beings. We all feel a bit abandoned. It’s difficult to be alone – although we have to be alone.”

This is one of the reasons she likes living in Paris: if you’re an outsider by nature, being in a foreign country is a profound relief. “I’m a legitimate foreigner,” she says. “I’m an Englishwoman speaking French. They have no references for me, or my life, my childhood, my upbringing, my schooling. I’m exotic. They like that, and I like that.” And they really do like that. Rampling was awarded the Légion d’Honneur in 2002, a rare accolade for an expat, and the French have a fond nickname for her, too: she is, quite simply, La Légende.

So how does it feel to be back? London, on the afternoon we meet in early December, is angrily cold, hardly welcoming. “It’s taken a while,” Rampling says. “It’s taken many, many, many years.” She was scarred by her former life here, a 1960s casualty – not drink or drugs, like her close friend Marianne Faithfull, but a quick rush to fame and then a brutal emotional crash. “It was a very short moment of time, that’s for sure, and we just happened to be in it. Marianne and I are exactly the same age, and we sort of crystallised in that moment.” They weren’t just made, but fixed: in plenty of minds, Faithfull and Rampling are still those wild girls revelling in liberation, their lives one long and decadent party. Faithfull put it another way when I interviewed her earlier this year: “We went through a bit of the same thing in the 60s,” she said. “She was treated like a pretty fool, too.” Rampling is more generous. “It was a very free time. Everything was possible, genuinely possible. Of course, it couldn’t last.”

Rampling’s breakthrough film was Georgy Girl (1966), in which she played Meredith, the saucy, gadabout flatmate to poor, ordinary Georgy. After Meredith has an unwanted baby, she lies in a hospital bed and files her nails. “It’s hideous,” she says of the newborn, gurgling in a crib at her feet. “I hate it.” This was Rampling announcing her talent: capable of speaking the unthinkable, relishing every moment.

In the same year, her older sister killed herself. When Rampling speaks of it now, her voice flattens. “I had something that came in that changed me, so I wasn’t so concerned with the world – more with what was actually happening in my own life,” she says. “My sister died, so it sort of shattered a lot of stuff.” That Sarah, three years older, had killed herself was kept a secret for years, in order to protect Rampling’s mother; she died in 2001, never knowing how her daughter had died. After Sarah’s death, Rampling says, “I went on a path that was quite different: having had lots of fun, having loved being part of the 60s, suddenly I wasn’t allowed to have fun any more.” Not allowed by whom – yourself? “Of course! How could I? If somebody dies that way, you don’t feel you can go to a party and have fun.” She is appalled at this idea. “And also, I could feel the whole thing turning. I could feel the whole thing going to vinegar.” Rampling flips her hand flat on the table to demonstrate, a quick, hard gesture. “Shhhhht.” Party’s over.

In the aftermath of that loss, Rampling turned inward. “My quest in life was to become psychologically in tune with myself.” Her quest? “Yes, it was my quest. I said, I do not want to feel like this all my life, so there’s got to be a lot of work going on here. And there was. She [Sarah] blasted that, which was good. Perhaps that was a good thing that came out of it. I wouldn’t have led the life I have led, had she not died.” A quest might sound a little grand but, Rampling says, matter of fact, “I just had no other choice. Otherwise I wasn’t going to make it. And I might as well try and make it, because one sister had gone and we wouldn’t want two sisters going.”

She changed course, getting married, twice – first to the actor Bryan Southcombe in 1972, and then to the composer Jean Michel Jarre six years later. She had a son by each – Barnaby, born in 1972, and David, in 1977. After she became a mother, work came second. “I just had to make a choice. And the choice that pulled me most was that I couldn’t bear to be separated from my children for too long. So if I was going to do a film that was going to be two months where I couldn’t get home, I’d say no. That was no sacrifice at all, because it was what I wanted.” People kept telling her that she’d disappear, be forgotten. “And I said, ‘Of course I’m going to work again, I just can’t work now. I’ll be ready in a year or a couple of years. Probably it’s the only thing in my life that I’m sure about.’” She looks surprised. “I don’t think I’ve ever even formulated that [before]. I knew there was something I had to say in this business. I knew there would be people who wanted me to say these things. That’s really what it was about.”

There are times like this when Rampling can sound regally self-confident, certain of her contribution and its worth. It is like talking to someone who has experienced a religious calling, and who had no option but to follow its voice. She was never interested in success in any mainstream sense – money, fame, Hollywood, awards. She says she never fought for a role, not because she didn’t have to, but because she was never self-assured enough to foist herself on a director. “I can’t impose on someone. I can’t impose on anyone, actually, in everyday life. I’m not about that. I open up and if someone wants it, come and get it. If not, OK. It’s always been like that. I find it very, very difficult to ask for anything.”

Fortunately, the roles came to her. Because acting was a therapy of sorts, Rampling played the parts she found difficult, complicated. “I needed to find characters that were going through the same things. I wasn’t in the business to entertain, I was in the business to learn, and so hopefully, through what I was doing, make others learn a bit. That was all. I couldn’t just make entertainment.” She doesn’t mean it to sound snooty, and she has occasionally dabbled in lighter material – Basic Instinct 2, for instance, in which she improbably played a psychiatrist in thrall to Sharon Stone. “I tried it once or twice and it absolutely didn’t work.”

So Rampling has played neurotics, victims, monsters and chimp-lovers. Two Nazi films, The Damned (1969) and The Night Porter (1974), set the tone. In the latter she played Lucia, a concentration camp inmate to Dirk Bogarde’s SS officer, and danced topless save for a pair of braces. Some years later, Bogarde wrote about working with Rampling, and described the power of her eyes – “green, wide, appalled”. This was The Look, not his phrase but Luchino Visconti’s, director of The Damned (in which Bogarde also starred). When Bogarde asked him why he’d cast Rampling, Visconti circled his eyes with his fingers and replied, “For ‘The Look’.” The label has stuck, and became an inspiration for François Nars, who made Rampling – “an endlessly watchable mystery” – the face of his cosmetics brand this year. But the mystery card can be overplayed. Here’s what Bogarde went on to say: “The very first time I met her, she was wearing the shortest miniskirt possible, and a pair of boy’s scarlet underbriefs, clearly visible beneath the skirt, a crumpled T-shirt, and rather grubby bare feet. She seemed to laugh a lot.”

The Look was pure performance. In a documentary made about her (entitled, inevitably, The Look), Rampling describes her signature feature as simply a result of “heavy eyelids”, a quirk of physiognomy that gives an intensity to her face even when she’s forking caramel shortcake into her mouth, as she is now. She contemplates a facelift, having The Look dismantled once and for all. “It’s actually going to close my eyes soon.” She laughs uproariously, and there’s the other side of her – as silly as she can be earnest. Before she arrived on the set of Broadchurch, the actors were apparently intimidated at the thought of this great brooding figure from the continent joining the cast. But she was the opposite – mischievous, good value. “I think the big secret is that she’s very funny, a proper giggler,” says Broadchurch’s writer and creator, Chris Chibnall.

There’s no giggling today, but there is a kind of childlike delight – at the carefully sliced strawberry and cream that accompanies her cake, and the fact that she, a Charlotte, is staying at the Charlotte Street hotel, on Charlotte Street.

The Look is easily replaced by The Grin, and you can see it in the one publicity photograph released for Broadchurch: a wide, easy smile as Rampling sits surrounded by the cast, like a hen encircled by chicks. What is her role among these younger actors – the auntly figure, handing out wisdom from on high? Rampling shakes her head. “I’m not an advice giver, unless I’m asked specifically, then I’ll talk away as much as they want. But I’ll never give my opinion about anything unless I’m asked – not with my children, either. It’s not what they want, you see.”

She sits forward, digging into her point.

“It’s very rare that people are really very interested in you. So when you have a journalist in front of you, you think, ‘Oh, this is nice.’” She laughs. “But when you start to talk to somebody, even a friend, you can just see them turn off.” She swipes a hand across her face, shutting it down.

Rampling doesn’t mind. She might not be as mysterious, or as serious, as people assume, but she is proudly self-sufficient, happiest when working and on the move. “Because it gets me out of the house. It gets me on the train, on the plane, into a hotel.” When she’s home between projects, she enjoys a few days of stillness. “But that can’t go on too long,” she says. “Things start to happen in my head.” Her grandchildren call her “Go-Go” because she’s always got a foot out of the door. And though she lives with her French partner, the businessman Jean-Noël Tassez, she is “often alone”. It works better that way.

“No co-dependence,” she says, frankly. “It’s a very hard thing to get right, I tell you.”

So what’s the secret?

“It’s a big one. I don’t know.”

But you’re living it.

“I know, I’m doing it! But I can’t give you the mode d’emploi. It’s about two people.” There’s a long pause while she thinks. And then: “Each person has got to want their own liberty more than anything else.”

More than the relationship itself?

“Of course. As a woman it’s a difficult thing. It’s more him that said that than me. Because I wouldn’t even have imagined it. But I realised from living with him that it’s an extraordinary thing – he respects my liberty, my freedom, as much as he needs his.”

For the moment, that freedom means work. “Retirement doesn’t happen to actors,” she says. “If people still want you to be out there, you can be out there.”

Next year, Rampling will appear alongside Ben Whishaw and Jim Broadbent in London Spy, a TV miniseries, and star opposite Tom Courtenay in 45 Years, an Andrew Haigh-directed portrait of a marriage. She says her part in that film has bedded in, taken hold of her psyche, as some of them do. Lucia from The Night Porter, Margaret from Max Mon Amour – certain characters will stay with her all her life. “I keep them all there.” She taps her chest. “I don’t know quite where – I’ve got rather a skinny old body – but they’re all inside.” Are they friends, or ghosts? “They are like…” She tails off, searching for the words. “I wouldn’t be the same without them. They came from me. It’s almost like they’re my daughters, really. I’ve created them and there’s no way I’d want to be separated from them.”

Recently, Rampling has been giving performances of a selection of Sylvia Plath’s work. The set usually begins with Lady Lazarus, Plath’s ferocious poem about suicide: “I’ve done it again / One year in every ten / I manage it.” It’s as draining as anything she’s ever done, but exhilarating, too, and good training – up there in front of a live audience, no props or cameras, just Rampling and the words and a cellist playing Britten. The show keeps her in actorly shape, away from the coddled seclusion and control of a film set. “You’ve got to keep turning the engine over,” she says. “It’s like a horse, isn’t it? You can’t leave a horse in a box.” She laughs suddenly and loudly at her choice of simile, the idea of herself as a creature in need of an occasional runaround, a leg-stretch in a paddock. “Horsey, horsey.”