Harper’s Bazaar, January 2010
There’s a crunchy moment in The Night Porter when Charlotte Rampling lays a trap for her ex-concentration-camp guard, played by Dirk Bogarde, which involves him walking over broken glass. He does so and smiles. Ten minutes into the interview with her and I know how he felt. The lacerations are minor, the attractions powerful. But there are moments when it feels bloody. It’s not that Rampling is openly hostile; just giving off waves of someone enduring a minor indignity, like a dental check-up. To be fair, she had been perfectly frank about her distaste for interviews, telling me that one reason she doesn’t do many films is that she finds ‘the exposure’ tawdry. ‘There are so many things I hate,’ she says, offering a steely smile. I grin back weakly, hoping I’m not the most recent addition to what’s obviously a long list.
Call me a cynic, but is there not a smidgen of disingenuousness here? Is she not – for all her smouldering disdain through photoshoots – just the teeniest bit complicit in this perennial curiosity about whether she still has ‘the Look’? (She does.) Doesn’t she actually enjoy the gasps of disbelief that the body which in the 1970s turned men into warm puddles on the floor is still, at sixty-three, a thing of beauty? Probably. But you believe her when, tightening her lip a little and making a face as though she’s swallowed something dodgy, she talks wanly of the rounds of film promotion – talks, that is, while avoiding eye contact and mostly directing her words diagonally across me to the restaurant wall. Still, at the start of a year that promises a number of high-profile Rampling performances – in films including an adaptation this September of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, co-starring Keira Knightley and Carey Mulligan; Danny Moynihan’s satire on the London art scene, Boogie Woogie, in spring; and, coming this autumn, the latest from American auteur Todd Solondz, Life During Wartime – she will surely have to gird herself for the inevitable run of ‘exposure’.
For a time, installed in a corner booth at the upscale London restaurant where we have agreed to meet, we just contend in awkwardness; she doing her cat impersonation, me the floppy old terrier who just wants to woof and play. But then, when I ask her in earnest (for this is what actually interests me) about how she came to be the mind-blowingly great actress she is, she emerges from under the hedge of her frowning, and turns directly towards me as if surprised that anyone – for a magazine article – would want to talk about how she came by her craft.
Then it suddenly becomes a very different story; a story, in fact, of how her life and art have flowed into each other, for she’s not shy about talking about some chapters – at least of her own family history, rather than her married life and loves – weighted though it is with trouble and sorrow.
Her father Godfrey Rampling died last year (aged 100), and no degree in advanced psychoanalysis is needed to understand that he was the true north on Rampling’s compass. It was from him she got her backbone and physical bravery. ‘Made you climb walls, did he?’ ‘Oh, everything,’ she says, ‘We [she and her sister] couldn’t be wimps.’ He saw in Charlotte the tomboy; the fighter, the one who in some way might be an athlete. Godfrey ran the second leg in the 400-metres relay at the notorious Berlin Olympics of 1936, and is captured in Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia winning the gold for Britain. The runner immediately behind him had fallen ill and was way behind when Godfrey took the baton and carved his way through the pack. ‘He was beautiful,’ Rampling emphasises, looking wistfully into the distance. ‘They said he ran like a god, and they were right.’ He paid a price for his heroics. A leg went out, and was never quite the same again.
Rampling was born ten years later, in Sturmer, Essex (I greet her as a fellow Essexian and she smiles in mildly snobbish surprise, ‘Really?’). Her father had already become remote or, in her own word, ‘frightening’, disappearing into silent distances that seem to have translated into emotional intimidation. In fact, he was as much frightened as the frightener. ‘Of what?’ ‘A haunting,’ says Rampling, sighing a little. ‘He began to carry the weight of the world on his shoulders.’ The load of it crushed him into periodic depressions, which his daughter felt the burden of, growing up first in Fontainebleau, where her father was stationed for NATO as a lieutenant colonel with the Royal Artillery (and where she was part-educated, becoming fluent in French); and perhaps even later, at a distance, at the girls’ boarding school St Hilda’s in Bushey, Hertfordshire.
The playpen of the late Sixties was, of course, the antidote to all this patriarchal gloom, and like so many other cool stunners, Rampling played hard. ‘I did everything very young,’ she says. She worked as a model before being spotted in a Cadbury commercial and cast in Silvio Narizzano’s 1966 classic Georgy Girl as the impossibly fine-boned, hard, hot number, against Lynn Redgrave’s adorable dumpy duckling who eventually gets the man.
Then came the shattering moment when the Swinging stopped. Her twenty-three-year-old older sister Sarah fell ill while pregnant, gave birth prematurely, fell into a steep depression and shot herself. Shortly after, their mother, who had always been very close to Sarah, suffered a stroke, and was left severely disabled. In a matter of weeks, Rampling, now in her early twenties and with the world about to be at her feet, was robbed of the two people she loved most in the world. (Her grief was disrupted by her father’s insistence, so as not to upset her mother during her long, painful rehabilitation, that the truth of Sarah’s suicide remain a secret. The official version would be that she suffered a cerebral haemorrhage.)
It’s not surprising that acting became a way of changing the subject, moving into someone else’s skin. If the part called for it, Rampling would do pain, not be its victim. It was while she was shooting an Italian film with Gianfranco Mingozzi in 1968 that Luchino Visconti spotted her and cast her in The Damned, his epic tale of dynastic corruption at the beginning of the Third Reich. As the Jewish daughter-in-law of the only liberal scion of the family, Rampling was pitch-perfect: tender, poignant and desperate (a rebuttal to those who think of her as mostly sexy-tough). I tell her that I’ve always thought one of the remarkable things about her career has been its range; and though it’s the truth, this is not something she’s used to hearing.
It’s a paradox. On the one hand, she insists that somehow there has to be something in the part that is also of her. On the other hand, she was crucially guided by Visconti to understand the psychological morphing needed to make a performance credible. (We enjoy a brief Visconti love-in when I reveal that some of my earliest movie passions as a teenager were La Terra Trema and, especially, Rocco and His Brothers, which took me weeks – if ever – to get over.) When she murmurs of his charisma and handsome, Marxist-aristo charm, it’s obvious that he became for her the warm-blooded fatherly mentor. When, in The Damned, she had to play a scene pleading for the life of her children, she went to Visconti in despair, saying she had no idea how to do it, that she couldn’t do it. ‘Listen, Charlotte,’ he said, ‘you don’t have to have done anything like this. You must just believe you have done it.’ Later, standing right beside the camera as she acted, he urged her: ‘See behind the eyes. See behind the eyes . . .’
Without Visconti’s guiding hand, then, there would have been no Night Porter and no international fame. It was Dirk Bogarde, the tortured male lead in The Damned, who saw she could play something quite different, and working with the director Liliana Cavani devised the script and plot for the strange, terrifying, sadomasochistic fantasy that became The Night Porter. Rampling recalls putting Visconti’s advice to the test early by having to do, right at the start of the shoot, ‘the fucking concentration-camp scene. I had to sing.’
For all the thunderstruck acclaim she received for the film, life was not altogether plain sailing. Many parts came along, many of them mediocre. Her first marriage (to actor Bryan Southcombe) broke up when she fell headlong for rock composer Jean Michel Jarre. It was mega-force love, and articles regularly appeared about the Beautiful Couple’s romantic life in Paris. But every so often, in the 1980s, she would hit a reef, falling into what sounds like the same depression experienced by her father. Being cared for by her husband, she’d recover, only to sink into the terror of its return.
There must have been a moment when Jarre had had enough, as he took up with a younger civil servant, and in 1997 Rampling’s second marriage ended. Then, in 2001, her mother died, and it freed something up in her. She became much closer to her father, moved by his kindness and love for her mother. (‘It was his redemption,’ she says.) And, when the truth about her sister’s suicide was let out, she was at last allowed to grieve.
The join between Rampling’s emotional life and working life became sewn together by the great French indie director François Ozon. She says, looking back on her career, that her best films have been ‘a documentary of me’. (Indeed, without the deep stain of her personal drama, her acting would just be an affectation, the calculated projection of ‘the Look’.) But in her two films for Ozon, Under the Sand (2000) and Swimming Pool (2003), she reached for, and achieved, something much more profound: the sensuality of melancholy; the embodiment of the angry wound.
In Under the Sand especially, in which she plays a childless, affectionate wife whose husband disappears on a beach in south-west France while she has her eyes closed sunbathing, Rampling’s capacity to play the light moments – bursts of wilt-inducing laughter in the midst of sex, breezy certainty in the gathering distress – give the drama its full tragic force.
She also loved playing Miss Havisham in a BBC adaptation of Great Expectations, reading Dickens and looking up David Lean’s classic to prep; and had the part of graceful, sexually potent middle age nailed. ‘They suited me,’ she says of roles in films like Laurent Cantet’s 2005 Heading South, about a professor who travels to Haiti for sex with the local young men.
But you somehow don’t want Rampling just to corner the market in sexually compulsive crosspatches, though she is said to perform brilliantly in a hotel-bedroom scene as a rich, unhappy sexual predator in the upcoming Life During Wartime. Still, the work she has done lately – including a feature about street dancers in England called StreetDance; Never Let Me Go, in which she plays the enigmatic and haunted headmistress Miss Emily; and a comic turn in Boogie Woogie – seems to draw on that capacity for range that Visconti first saw in her. ‘But I just don’t get that many parts,’ she says, ‘not the scripts I can be bothered with.’ After her sister died, she swore she would not make films ‘just to entertain’. And if there have been projects in the past that have fallen short of that lofty principle, there’s no doubt that, in her early sixties, she no longer has truck with the mediocre.
It’s dark now, out there on the rain-slick London street; and gradually the lights are being dimmed in the Italian restaurant. The tape recorder goes off. I order glasses of white wine. She demurs for a second and then is happy when I overrule her. She is off later to see her friend Kevin Spacey’s play of Inherit the Wind at the Old Vic. With her velvety voice, it’s not surprising she has done theatre both in London and Paris – a Marivaux and the unedited, terrifying version of Strindberg’s Dance of Death. But now she wants to talk a bit about my childhood, not hers, and we do, friendliness replacing professional curiosity. She has stopped looking at the wall. ‘What am I going to do to pass the time?’ she teases, giving me the full-on charm. I am speechless. Then the angel passes, and back comes a self-satirising version of Grumpy Puss. ‘Will it be good?’ she worries of the play. It’s the audience, not the actors, she’s already taking exception to. The massed sitting, the clapping . . . ‘You know I hate places where people all do the same thing.’ The fact that she laughs at her own vehemence is a sure sign she really means it.