Charlotte Rampling: “I Didn’t Want To Be A Celebrity” (original) (raw)

Still a class act at 80, fizzing with wry wisdom and fresh from leading the cast in Jim Jarmusch’s surprise Golden Lion winner, Charlotte Rampling is once again rewriting the script on style, success and everything in between. By Giles Hattersley. Photographs by Mark Kean. Styling by Robbie Spencer.

Lunch in Paris? With Charlotte Rampling? As she turns 80? Yes please. Can you imagine, Lucia from The Night Porter is 80! For the rendezvous she’s chosen a fish restaurant near her home in the 6th so old-school the carpets are blue. Honestly, everything is perfect. She arrives at the stroke of 1pm, fashion-plate fab, eyes alive with that same DGAF wisdom she’s been emanating since the 1960s, back when she was outraging the shires with her style and hanging out with the Beatles. (Did she date any of them, I attempt? Apparently not – though she still likes catching up with Paul at Stella’s shows.)

Today – with a starring role in Jim Jarmusch’s Venice winner Father Mother Sister Brother, which is about to be released, wearing a simple black rollneck to great effect, occasionally popping on a pair of glasses that she bought off the rack at a shop downstairs from her little apartment – she orders the sole meunière for two. Later she’ll request half of hers is tin-foiled to take home to her cats, and in the interceding hours will talk in that lightly Franglais tone about pretty much anything you like: work, love, sex, death, fashion. Hypnotically throwaway, always penetrating, you can practically feel your brain cells altering in her wake.

I worried that it would be gauche to quiz her on her decade turn – she was 80 in February – but it turns out that she’s up for it. She has thoughts: “Because every decade does change you,” she explains, no truck with the “age is just a number” crowd. Typically, she puts off consideration until it’s upon her. “So I hadn’t thought about it until last year. Then I said to myself: ‘OK, well, if I can live as long as my dad, I’ve got another 20 years.’” Rampling’s father, Godfrey, was Britain’s oldest living Olympian when he died in 2009 aged 100. A military man and 4 x 400 metre relay whiz, he medalled at consecutive games in the 1930s and retired a lieutenant colonel of the Royal Artillery in 1958. After a childhood of foreign postings and upper lips so rigid it’s a wonder anybody got a vowel out, one can only imagine the familial pivot required when Charlotte, a smash hit in her school plays, essentially sauntered onto the King’s Road at some point in the 1960s and became a sensation. She smouldered on screens – enigmatic, bewitching, lusted upon with the icky-but-name-making fervour of the 1970s tabloids – and became forever known by the sobriquet her costar Dirk Bogarde bestowed on her: the Look.

Shearling jacket, Gucci

Mark Kean

Well, he nailed that one. More than half a century on, she hangs out with everyone from Anthony Vaccarello to Juergen Teller (“my little brother”), scored a first Oscar nomination at 69, and so far this decade has appeared in 11 feature films, including two outings in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune franchise. When her latest, in which she plays a stilted, unknowable mother to Cate Blanchett and Vicky Krieps in Jarmusch’s hypnotically low-key triptych of familial tales, triumphed at Venice last September it felt, well, not like another day at the office exactly, but also not like some rare, validating late-life triumph for Rampling. Rather another marker of excellence.

Hooded wool sweater, wool-knit trousers, and chain belt, Louis Vuitton. Slingbacks, as before

Mark Kean

And she’s great company. Yes, her small talk is zingy – beauty regimes, oddball designers, a bit of goss – but before you know it it’s back to: “It’s a miracle we get through it,” she says of life. “It really is. You can have moments of joy, moments of obvious tragedy, everyone suffers a lot but there’s certain things you learn to privilege, I suppose.” Then she has a little nibble of fish.

Certainly, her existence has hinged on a series of intriguing choices – her move to Paris 50 years ago, the rejection of Hollywood (as a concept at least, it certainly never rejected her), two marriages, two children, one stepchild, a long and successful set-up with her late partner, or even living in a polyamorous throuple decades before those words were much of a thing. Yet she takes the air out of the room at one point when, discussing her older sister Sarah’s suicide in 1967, aged 23, she says that when you really boil it down that “is the one choice we have in life” – the decision to end it or not. For Rampling it informed all that followed because: “When you have a suicide in your family, that’s not an option anymore. I didn’t have that choice [after] Sarah did what she did. So in a sense, it can save people. I just knew that I had to keep on going.”

The sisters were close, growing up in Gibraltar, France and Spain, performing a cabaret of their own invention together as kids. Doubtless adding to the burden, not only was Sarah living in Buenos Aires when she died but the family felt it must keep its circumstances a secret from her mother, claiming a brain haemorrhage, until she passed in 2001.

Nylon shirt and pencil skirt, Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello

Mark Kean

Today Rampling is open about her own mental health; the depressive bouts that can come for her “like gremlins”. She’s assembled a toolkit, she says, from learning about Buddhism and psychedelic-assisted therapies back in the day, via mediation and psychoanalysis, to seeking out thinkers of all stripes now. “I can deal with it but it’s huge work. You do really have to always be aware and careful and pick up all the information you can get.” Any tips? “I will never be able to do something really harmful to anyone because I know that harm will come back to me,” she says. “I don’t remember many things about my childhood, but it’s always been an unspoken motto. It means that you won’t have the pain of inflicting pain, and if you have unintentionally you can always apologise and say, ‘I’m really sorry.’”

In practice, these life lessons are right there with her on camera, be it for directors such as François Ozon and Lars von Trier, in advertising campaigns for Marc Jacobs or Givenchy, or indeed in the fashion portraits, by Mark Kean, that accompany this piece. In person as in imagery, moving or otherwise, Rampling remains forever still, unflinching, somehow taking on the twin roles of projector and screen. “We all need to suffer to be able to become real human beings,” she explains of her magnetic energy field, smiling from across the table. “We already know that.”

Was she always this way? Perhaps. Uncommonly beautiful since the year dot, she made her way to the big screen via a Cadbury’s advert and an early appearance in Vogue as a teen model. Her cinematic debut came as an uncredited dancer in A Hard Day’s Night – if there’s a more 1960s line on a CV, I’ve yet to find it – and after a flurry of parts toyed with moving to LA. But: “I didn’t like Hollywood at all,” she says, still a little sharp about it. “I didn’t like the vibe. I didn’t want to be that person and I didn’t want to be that kind of actor. I wanted to investigate life in a different way to just getting ‘great’ parts and wanting to get Oscars. I didn’t want to be a celebrity.” It was Luchino Visconti, who directed her in 1969’s The Damned, who told Rampling: “You have a great talent, you have a great beauty, you can go to Hollywood, you can be a great star, or you can do it a different way.” So she chose the latter, honing “a more European understanding of what success is about”. Which worked out pretty well.

Despite personifying her era’s tearaway spirit she was never big into one-night stands or getting high. “Well, yes, it was free love, wasn’t it? In London, it was huge. Suddenly you could just do it with anybody, and it was almost very exciting, but that didn’t actually interest me. When you do it and you’ve done it, you think: ‘Oh, OK. I don’t really feel great about all that.’” Free love or not, judgement remained harsh for women, she says. Plus, she had her suspicions that it all fit male patterns of desire more anyway.

In 1972, she married the actor-turned-publicist Bryan Southcombe and had her first son, Barnaby. There was much sizzle at the time over the fact they also once lived with Randall Laurence, a model. We chuckle at how each generation thinks it’s breaking new ground, when so many romantic set-ups have been around forever. She is magnanimous. “Each generation has to reinvent themselves,” she reasons. “They have to feel that they are going to be able to understand things in a different way, and maybe not a better way, but just in their way.” She and Southcombe divorced in 1976. She followed it up with a long and storied marriage to the French musician Jean-Michel Jarre, with whom she has a son, David, as well as a close relationship with his daughter, Émilie. In the late 1990s the pair split when she found out Jarre had been having an affair by reading about it in the papers – a step too far even for her high tolerance for human foibles.

But here’s the rub for Rampling when it comes to men: forgive them if you can. “He’s one of my best friends,” she says now. “I loved him dearly and still love him, it just had to change. With Jean-Michel, it took a while. A long, long time. But it’s a huge subject: resentment. It completely poisons your life. If you can find ways just to let that go, let that go.” She was rewarded with a long and happy relationship with the journalist and businessman Jean-Noël Tassez who – though 10 years her junior – died from cancer in 2015. “So the last 10 years was learning to live alone,” she says. “That’s quite a thing, to go onto that stage of your life learning what your own solitude is and coming to terms with it.”

Leather jacket, poplin shirt with neck-tie, leather skirt, and belt, Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello.

Mark Kean

And now? “Now I’m based mostly in Paris, I live with my cats, I have a wonderful man. Une amitié amoureuse, that’s what it’s called. It’s sort of a loving friendship.” Wow, I think that’s what I want. Perhaps I need to stop aspiring for a boyfriend. She nods kindly, then replies. “Yeah, but you’re too young I think for that one because you can have an affair with someone and then it just turns into a lovely friendship. And that’s lovely,” she says, “that you don’t need them like you used to need them.”

“We’re all 10 years younger now,” she continues, dryly. But she means it. “The 60s are fun but the 70s are tough, I’ll warn you now. During my 70s, I was doing an enormous amount to try and get to a place where if I were only to have, say, another 10 years, which could well be, that those 10 years would be really fulfilling. And I would not have to keep doing the work that I had to do for so long to keep going. Vocalise, journal, cry out, scream out, smile out, talk, have conversations. Now I would like to live off of that.”

Sanguinity reigns as the waiters circle with the bill. “Twenty years isn’t very long,” she says, assessing her time ahead, her father’s centennial lifespan front of mind. “Let’s keep as healthy as possible, because that’s the main thing, and then we’ll just go for it and hope that everything follows. I feel that the rewards are actually being given to me now and that I will be able to, even if I maybe get ill or maybe have cancer, or I don’t know what I’m going to have, but I think I will be able to actually have a pretty good time. I feel that I deserve it. I feel I’ve worked for it…”

“So that’s where I’m at,” she says, smiling. “Since you asked.”