Rampling’s renaissance
Legendary screen goddess of the 1960s and 1970s, Charlotte Rampling talks about her latest film, Heading South
Rampling’s Renaissance
THE ALLURING CHARLOTTE RAMPLING – WHOSE CAREER LAUNCHED WITH EROTIC 1970S FILMS – RETURNS
FINALLY, at 60 years old, Charlotte Rampling seems to have softened. She’s smiling and those famous green-grey eyes are twinkling. Then a group of Italian men sitting nearby on the terrace of Venice’s Exclesior Hotel start heated discussions, disturbing the calm. The smile’s gone. “They’re getting on my nerves,” she snaps. “Can we shut them up?” Someone dashes off and gesticulates with the men, pointing at Rampling. The actress fixes the men with that glacial stare. The terrace falls silent and the smile returns.
This is the legendary Rampling power in action – a chilling magic that has bewitched audiences and directors around the world, from the Swinging Sixties until now, when a personal renaissance appears under way and she’s busier than ever. The list of cinema greats who clamoured for her services throughout the 1970s and 1980s includes Luchino Visconti (The Damned), John Boorman (Zardoz), Woody Allen (Stardust Memories), Alan Parker (Angel Heart) and Sidney Lumet (The Verdict).
Now a whole new generation of talent has helped her to rediscover her allure in the new millennium, with directors such as France’s François Ozon (Under the Sand and Swimming Pool), Italy’s Gianni Amelio (The Keys to the House) and now Laurent Cantet in his latest film, Heading South, in which Rampling plays Ellen, a mature woman looking for intimacy in 1970s Haiti. It’s yet another startling performance and another film in which she pushes the boundaries.
“Heading South is about the right of women to love and to feel loved at any age. They go to this hotel to create a paradise for themselves when their reality is actually pretty sad,” she says.
Rampling’s Ellen is Queen Bee of the hotel, a strange yet inviting place populated by brassy white women enjoying cocktails and the company of lithe young local men. Gradually it becomes apparent that these women return every year, hooked on the passion of the Haitians. “I found it a disturbing role to play,” reflects Rampling. “I mean, can you imagine how arid this woman’s home life must be that she has to go to a foreign land to find brief happiness? It’s distressing to think that it’s the only way they can find love. I just know that Ellen’s looking to be loved, cared and adored by somebody who will be kind and sweet to her and do everything she wants. She wants a Prince Charming, so she fabricated him and made him exist there in Haiti.”
Rampling spends much of the film in a swimsuit and appears at ease with her body despite being at an age when most actresses, if they are working at all, wouldn’t dream of disrobing. “It amazes me that I’m still doing this and getting away with it,” she chuckles. “It’s only because people keep coming to me, mainly younger men now I think of it, and asking me to play these different roles. And I rather like it.”
So why does she say yes? “That’s a big question,” she smiles. I remind her she always plays parts that challenge the sexuality of her characters and society. Films such as The Night Porter which brought leather-bound eroticism to post-Nazi Europe and created some of the most unforgettable images of Rampling.
She responds, “There’s probably something in your inherent make-up that you’re releasing and playing with. Maybe I created a ‘baggage’, for want of a better word, an aura about myself early on with these particular roles. It doesn’t seem to have waned even though I’ve always played my age. It does seem that there are now different subjects coming up for women. I guess I was a precursor for women my age and that’s stuck with me my whole career.”
Like Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, age cannot wither her and she keeps fighting it by refreshing herself. A recent spell in Marivaux at London’s National Theatre was, she says, invigorating. “I should have returned to the stage ages ago, it’s like an energising blast. You get fed up with the cut up process of making a film and it’s a new leaf to be doing a piece the whole way through every night in front of an audience. I went back to film refreshed and I will go back to theatre again soon, probably in London.”
She currently divides her time, “pretty much 50/50”, between London and Paris, but for many years she lived solely in Versailles with musician Jean-Michel Jarre. A decade ago, their 20-year love story ended. They fell for each other at a dinner party in 1976 – “It was instantaneous,” she once said. “The breath went from my body. We knew, we both knew.” She left her first husband, Bryan Southcombe, the very next day. Charlotte helped raise Jarre’s daughter Emilie, 29, from his first marriage, her son with Southcombe, Barnaby, 34, and their own son David, 28.
Her movie work continued, fitfully, and despite appearances with Sean Connery and Paul Newman, she refused a career in Hollywood, partly to remain close to Jarre and the children, partly from distaste for the American way of movies. She has said in the past: “The way they work in America is efficient, but they like to appeal to larger audiences and so they don’t go deep enough for me into their characters.”
Rampling is attracted to roles when she’s in opposition to them. “Then, morally it’s uncomfortable and it makes it more discordant, which can be good for the movie. I prefer to like my characters but you don’t have to,” she continues. “It’s also good working in antagonism, working in reaction to somebody whose morality you quite despise.”
And so she continues to balance her career, starting this year as Chairman of the Jury at the Berlin Film Festival, then appearing as a psychiatrist in Basic Instinct 2 and filming an English costume drama, playing Sam Neill’s wife for director François Ozon.
“I do have a childlike side that only close friends and family see. To stay closest to your source of creativity is to stay closest to where you were when you were very young and maybe I have returned nearer to that spot of late.” This may have something to do with her love for her three grandchildren and a self-confessed obsession with new technology, which she says has re-invigorated her life – presumably along with living with her partner, business consultant Jean-Noel Tassez, who is 10 years her junior, and to whom she has been engaged for a couple of years.
“I’ve just got to grips with emails and I love it,” she laughs. “How wonderful to have such communication at your fingertips. And I’ve even got an iPod, though I let my sons put all the music on it. At first I just wanted classical music and some old Sixties favourites but they kept saying things like, ‘Oh go on Mum, get with it!’ So now I’ve got Oasis, Blur and James Blunt and, you know, I’m delighted with that.”
She promises to keep working as long as people keep asking her to – with one proviso: “I may have made some odd films, but I’ve never made crap, and I’ve never done it for the money,” she adds emphatically. “It’s about honour. I’d rather go to bed with honour than a bank balance. I’ll feel much better in the morning.”
