Charlotte Rampling interview: ‘You have to do nasty things to get on’

Charlotte Rampling is gliding down a grand staircase, framed by the light from an arched window, as I walk up to greet her. She’s tall, elegant, dressed in soft grey linen, a gentle wave at the parting of her boyish haircut. There’s an echo of the siren in a red dress who descended a similar staircase in Farewell, My Lovely back in 1975 – “Mitchum, the last of the tough guys, meets Rampling, the hottest of the new broads”, ran the trailer.

Was she cast as an object of desire back then? “No, I never felt I was that. I mean, desire, yeah. But you need desire in films, you need to have magnetic creatures on screen, people that look great, and then you can do stories around them.”

There are a lot of those. Rampling is 76 now and has made more than a hundred films. We’re in a stately hotel in Edinburgh talking about her latest, Juniper, which she filmed in New Zealand just before the pandemic hit.

She speaks quietly and holds herself with stillness and poise. Sometimes she reaches up to the wings of the collar of her white shirt and brings them together, a physical gesture of closing off the flow of her voice. All the drama in her is contained in those hooded grey-blue-green eyes, so bored and catlike when stealing Georgy Girl from Lynn Redgrave and Alan Bates in 1966; so luminous in Luchino Visconti’s The Damned, and alight with pale, dangerous fire as they gazed at Dirk Bogarde in the sado-masochistic love story The Night Porter in 1975. Rampling’s eyes may be the most mysterious in all of cinema.

“I gotta tell ya, you’re incredibly beautiful,” Woody Allen told her at the beach in Stardust Memories (1980). “I guess I’m a little on the beautiful side,” she shrugged in return. Helmut Newton’s striking nude portrait of her remains an iconic image of the 1970s. “I know that the camera loves me,” Rampling once said, and it’s a love that has endured through the decades. In 2003, she flipped her screen persona on its head in Francois Ozon’s Swimming Pool, as a prim, sexually frustrated novelist brought back to dark, glittering life by the presence of her publisher’s wild-child daughter at a French country house. This thrilling display of range deepened further when she played a wife tormented by the ghost of another woman in her marriage in 45 Years.

She gives another bravura performance as Ruth, a former war photographer raging against the dying of the light, in Juniper. “She’s the kind of gal I like,” says Rampling. “There’s someone like her living in me, that’s for sure.”

Ruth is a sullen, chairbound alcoholic, caustic and violent. After shattering the bones in one of her legs, she is taken, unwillingly, by her son to the house he shares with her rebellious teenage grandson. “How much would it take for a clean slate? $500? $1,000?” she asks the Anglican priest who visits her, hoping that she might feel a twitch upon the thread. “Well, f--- off then,” she tells him. “I have no regrets.” Underneath her cynicism, though, is a burning desire for a last grasp at life at its most vivid. “I want one more passionate love affair,” she declares.

The son soon disappears, leaving Ruth and her grandson to their internecine warfare – “give me my gin, you little s---”. At one point, he offers his head, unflinchingly, for her to throw a glass at his face. She takes him up on it. Has Rampling ever done such a thing? “No, but I liked doing that, because it’s really how I think a lot of us feel: some people really need it, to have a glass thrown at their head.” She starts to laugh.

Is violence an underexplored aspect of women’s nature? “Well, it wasn’t… remember in the films of the ’40s and ’50s, they were feisty those women. I’m not saying they were necessarily liberated but they had power. Those wonderful actresses, Joan Crawford running a bar in Johnny Guitar, she is just incredible and quite violent, too.”

Ruth is partly based on the reporter Martha Gellhorn, veteran of a dozen major conflicts, “tough and brash yet delicate in her way”, as the New York Times once described her. She travelled to the Spanish Civil War with Ernest Hemingway, whom she married in 1940 but divorced after five turbulent years. Gellhorn, the “raspy-voiced maverick” who thought boredom “the real killer”, died after swallowing a cyanide pill at the age of 89.

Rampling compares the war reporter’s life to film acting, in the way that you’re “consumed by the fire of it and the camaraderie, despite the difficulties and the boredom”. When it stops, she says, or when a film ends, “you suddenly feel that you’re terribly alone.”

She sees herself as a shy introvert, driven to perform. She can be austere and daunting; the photographer Juergen Teller, who has worked with her for many years, said he was “terrified” when he first met her. “I think from the amount of people that have said it,” she admits, it must be true, but, she adds, “I think they feel the extent of my fear. But I dominate it so well. I think fear is the biggest power and the biggest flame and the thing that pushes you on.”

She knows, though, that she can use her voice to change the temperature in a room, a weapon that director Denis Villeneuve deployed in his blockbuster adaptation of Dune, casting her as the fearsome Reverend Mother Mohiam of the Bene Gesserit sisterhood. “It doesn’t speak to me this question. It does not speak to me,” she says, coolly, when I ask her about ageing. “I really don’t have a relationship with it. It will be what it will be. I don’t think about it at all. My face is not too bad, so I don’t have to have surgery. [Even] if I’d wanted to, I probably never would have had because I was too frightened of it and I don’t agree with it. I’m sort of fascinated by my face getting old. That’s no problem…

“I keep myself, resolutely, as well and as strong, as I can, physically,” she adds. “That really is important, because a lot of ageing is about giving up. A lot of people have to retire.” Filmmaking provides the possibility of continuing, she says, as long as you have desire: “to say, I can’t not do this, even if you don’t really want to because you’re a bit tired, you know.’”

Her physical robustness – and that animal grace she possesses on screen – is inherited. “I’ve got, I think, very much my father’s body, the muscular tone,” she says. Godfrey Rampling won a gold medal in the 4x400m relay in the Berlin Olympics of 1936. His inspirational second leg, storming past the field to take Great Britain into the lead, is captured in Leni Riefenstahl’s still astonishing Olympia. “It’s very moving, because it’s the only footage I’ve got of him,” Rampling says. “And I know how it hurt him, because they didn’t train, you know.”

It was her father she thought of when she let slip something that caused a stir which reverberated as far as the Vatican at the turn of the 1970s. She was sharing a house with Bryan Southcombe (her future husband and the father of her eldest son Barnaby) and the male model Randall Laurence, “I was very frank. I don’t think people did that quite then. But we weren’t thinking, oh, if I say this, shouldn’t perhaps say that, because I mean, now we have to think what the young people think. Because it’s not correct, it’s not this, it’s not that, but then it was like, when David Wigg of the Daily Express asked me, which one do you love? I just said, I love them both, I wouldn’t be able to choose...

“And then they decided to make it into something – I can understand why – two men with a woman. My father was not too pleased. ‘What will people think at the golf club, Charlotte?’

“He was a really good man,” she tells me, but she was afraid of him, “he never became violent, but he was so angry” – she revs into the word. A Lieutenant-Colonel in the Royal Artillery, Godfrey had married into wealth by wedding a party-loving Gatsbyesque heiress of the Gurteen clothing manufacturers. Yet he never got over being given up at the age of seven by his war-widow mother when she remarried. She kept his younger siblings, while he was sent to live with his grandmother, whom Rampling describes simply as “a severe woman”. “I love this child who will emerge victorious,” she writes in her poetic 2017 memoir Who I Am. “He was, I found out much later, a very tortured man. It’s probably where I get my angst from,” Rampling says, making at first simply a teeth-clenched rrrrrgh sound to describe how it feels, before settling on a word. “My son, I realise, also has it.”

She’s talking not of Barnaby (who directed her in the 2011 thriller I, Anna), but the magician David Jarre, son from her second marriage to the French musician Jean-Michel Jarre. Rampling and Jarre also brought up Émilie, from the composer’s first marriage; her memoir is dedicated to all three. The glamorous couple met at a dinner party in St Tropez in 1976; it was before Jarre found great fame with the album Oxygène, released later that year, which went to No 2 in the UK (and 146 in France). They separated 20 years later over his infidelity.

It was David, though, who rang her from Argentina to tell her he was at his aunt’s grave in Buenos Aires, with his cousin, the only son of her elder sister Sarah. His call set something in motion. In Who I Am, Rampling writes from the heart, “I’m coming, Sarah. I want to tell our story. I want to be with you.” Rampling tells of the girl with whom she made her stage debut at 14, in Stanmore parish hall, singing French songs in fishnets and raincoats, before they sneaked off after school together to do the same at an audition for a club in Piccadilly. At 21, Sarah left to visit New York, then went on to Acapulco, where she met a rich cattle rancher, and within a week had married him.

Three years later, the phone rang at home. Sarah had died by suicide. Her death was a crushing, life-changing blow for Rampling, although her father did not reveal that she had taken her own life for years after. Earlier, when I ask her if she was very wild in the 1960s, she says, “Well, I was until Sarah went. Then I just went inside.” Does the passage of time make it any easier to understand her suicide? “I don’t think so. Because I wouldn’t ever do it. I could never do what my sister did, I couldn’t do that to my parents. You’ll say, your parents are dead. Yes, but they’ll know about it… I couldn’t do it again… I wasn’t allowed to do it.”

Would she undo Sarah getting married so young and being so far from home? “Well,” she says, with a deep exhalation, “poor love, that didn’t help. But she was on her way. And you can’t undo anything for somebody else. Whatever track she was on, it was a tragic track. Or it was a terrible mistake.”

Rampling, who had been a model before she became an actress, was different after it. “It changed my perception of what I could do in films, how I could be in films and how I could carry on making films. After she’d done what she’d done, and the whole family had just collapsed.” It was part of what allowed Rampling to push societal norms past breaking point in perhaps her greatest film, The Night Porter, in which she plays a concentration camp inmate who renews the pain-seeking love she shares with Bogarde’s Nazi officer-in-hiding in Vienna after the war. She is also, she admits, transgressive by nature.

She left Britain, briefly, to do three films in Hollywood in the early 1970s – “but after the third one I was exhausted. I didn’t like the way of life there. I was miserable… I thought I’ve gotta get out of here. It was almost like it was poisonous. Of course, it wasn’t. Although it was a bit weird at that time. But then Hollywood has been weird quite a lot. You’ve got to sort of understand how to navigate places like Hollywood. It’s fake, and it was the fake in it that seemed to be intolerable when you’re going through the particular trauma that I was going through.”

Does she think she came to fame at a time when it was much harder to find good roles for women? “I think there have always been good roles,” she says. And what of how women were treated in the industry. “Because I’m an actor, you’re asking me this?” she says, levelling those eyes on me. I’m aware she has consistently declined to talk about issues around #MeToo –“I don’t dare speak about this,” she told Screen International in 2018. “It’s sort of the name of the game, that’s why,” she continues. “Not that I’m saying I’m in any way favouring it obviously, [it’s] despicable. But that’s what it does. If you want the role… well, you’re going to do things to get it, aren’t you? … And then if you do that, then you do have to take on the consequences. If it’s then you’re just taken and hit or raped or whatever, no, no, no. But if it’s because you agree that that’s the way it has to be, even though it’s unfortunate…” – she pauses – “but it’s like that in a lot of jobs, you have to do rather nasty things to get on, don’t you?”

Returning to Britain, she bought a little house in Chelsea, but didn’t feel at home here either, and moved to France to build a life there. European film directors welcomed her subtlety; she is feted there, and was awarded the Légion d’Honneur in 2002. “I love my country,” she says, “but there’s something about it that I have to leave to be able to actually breathe and live… as long as I can come back.” What of Brexit? “I think Britain needs a Brexit. I think they need to get back to being British. But that’s just a heartfelt thing. Leave aside all the things that are gonna happen which are going to annoy us Europeans. I’m still English, though, I wouldn’t ever give away my British passport.”

It is the planet Arrakis, though, where we may see her next. She’s returning in part two of Dune, which, bizarrely, she once picked as her castaway’s book on Desert Island Discs (“it was Jean-Michel who adored it; I took it on holiday once”). But she confesses, she was nearly a part of one of the great never-happened films of the 1970s – an adaptation of Dune by cult director Alejandro Jodorowsky, which he planned as a film “that gives LSD hallucinations, without taking LSD”. “He wanted me to be Jessica [the mother of the novel’s hero, Paul Atreides]. And because he’s so visionary, so surrealist, Hollywood was just getting more and more frightened… I saw him the other day, actually. And we talked about it. He’s 93 now. And he’s doing, maybe doing his last film, which he wants me to be in. And I said, ‘Well, this time I will. This time we’ll make it.’”

Juniper is in cinemas from September 23