Charlotte Rampling turned her back on the mainstream and found her own cinematic career path, she tells Michael Dwyer.
Charlotte Rampling is a woman of many parts. In a remarkably adventurous film career that has spanned the globe and over 40 years, she has played characters that have been wealthy and controlling (in The Wings of the Dove), stricken by grief (Under the Sand), psychic (Angel Heart), psychopathic (Asylum), in a sadomasochistic relationship (The Night Porter), and falling in love with a chimpanzee (Max Mon Amour). In French director Laurent Cantet's new film, Heading South (Vers le Sud), Rampling is cast as a sex tourist in 1970s Haiti.
In sharp contrast to the stereotypical image of sex tourists as seedy older men, the predators in Cantet's thoughtful, provocative film are three well-to-do, middle-aged women jealously competing for the paid sexual favours of a handsome 18-year-old beach boy. The movie directly addresses both the nature of this exploitation and the intense sexual satisfaction it provides.
Rampling plays the most pragmatic of the women - Ellen, a Boston college lecturer in French literature on her sixth consecutive Haitian summer holiday. "Ellen is leading a double life," Rampling says as we talk over a light lunch at a central Paris hotel. "I'm sure nobody back in Boston has any idea of what she does on her summer holidays. A lot of people have another life, doing a lot of things that they never talk about. There are many double lives in this world. I was rather disturbed by that character. I asked myself if I would do what she did, and the answer was no, I wouldn't. I never needed to do that. The film develops through the thought process rather than through the image process. It allows you to think about it."
She agrees that the film tackles a theme that would be unthinkable in present-day US cinema, even though the three protagonists are North American women. "It would be inconceivable now for an American company to make it," she says, "even as an independent film. It's just a silly time in America, with very few exceptions such as what George Clooney is doing. If cinema can't speak its voice, that's worrying. That's why I've done so few American films. If you want to do a basic entertaining film, that's fine - a film where everything is weakened down and covered in music and you're told what to think."
Furthermore, films attempting to deal with the desires of women over a certain age generally tend to played for sentimentality or for laughs. "Yes, that's what they did with Something's Gotta Give, that film with Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson that everyone seemed to like, but I didn't. I was cringing at it because it was all so twee. To confront that in reality is very interesting, and European cinema is willing to do that."
RAMPLING'S FILM DEBUT was a fleeting appearance as a water-skier in The Knack, which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1965. "I skied across the screen," she laughs. "There was me and Jane Birkin and Jacqueline Bisset, and we were these Swinging London girls, fantasy figures for the main character." Her first leading role followed when she was 18, in Rotten to the Core. "I was almost put under contract to the Rank Organisation when I did that," she says. "It was a comedy and I was the kooky girl who ran away from her dad to be with the robbers. The contract era was coming to an end, so it didn't happen, which was just as well." Instead, she burned up the screen as a bitchy character in Georgy Girl.
"It was quite interesting to be starting out as a bitch," she says. "If you're not well-known, which I wasn't, and you launch on to the screen playing somebody like that very convincingly, people, even people in the business, automatically think you must be a hell of a handful." Then she laughs again. "Sometimes I am, sometimes I'm not."
In 1969, when she was 23, the great Italian director Luchino Visconti cast her with Dirk Bogarde and Helmut Berger in his bold Third Reich-era drama, The Damned, taking her on what was to prove a fascinating career path, not dissimilar to that taken by Bogarde. "Yes, he did much the same," she says. "He was with the Rank Organisation for years, doing all these romantic comedies and glamour films. Suddenly, he said that's it, and he closed the door on it. It was a conscious effort on my part, because I didn't want to be doing lightweight stuff all the time, not that Georgy Girl was lightweight."
Working with Visconti was "magnificent," she says. "Coming out of filming in England, it was just so exotic. I hadn't travelled much when my father was in the army, and mostly to France, where I learned French at a French school. To come from my quite ordinary upbringing into Visconti's world was magic. And he became my master. He had this big crush on me, and he took me under his wing. I lived in this big house with him and Helmut Berger at the time. One of my regrets, and I don't care to have regrets, was that I couldn't work with him again on The Innocent when he asked me."
Her globetrotting career brought her to Ireland for John Boorman's Zardoz in 1974, and for Yves Boisset's Purple Taxi three years later, and she speaks warmly of her time filming here. She describes filming in the US as "three minutes a day" with the rest of an actor's time spent waiting around. "It's different on European films, when you often have a very small budget and you just have to shoot everything very quickly."
SHE HAS, HOWEVER, featured in some accomplished US productions: Farewell My Lovely with Robert Mitchum ("the last of the great cowboys, in the good sense of that term"), The Verdict with Paul Newman and James Mason, and Alan Parker's Angel Heart, which has acquired a cultish reputation. "It has, hasn't it?" she says. "I really like Alan and the way he includes everybody. Angel Heart is such a strong film, one of his best, and it stands up very well today. It so gets under your skin."
Rampling, who turned 60 in February, has been going through a golden age recently, beginning this decade with one of the towering performances of her career in Francois Ozon's Under the Sand (Sous le Sable), as a grief-stricken woman whose husband mysteriously disappears on a beach one day.
"It was inspired by something Francois witnessed on a beach when he was 12 years old," she says. "This woman was out of her head because her husband had vanished. Francois wanted to explore what might have happened to that woman, and he imprinted that on me. I just tried to imagine what happened and how she felt. What was she going to do? It was a film about absence, and as we continued filming, it became something else. We really didn't know what would emerge, and we were surprised by what did. It was very special."
Does she find it emotionally draining to have to delve so deep inside such an emotionally troubled character? "No, that's what I look for," she says. "I find it more emotionally draining if I don't have something like that to work with. I need to get my teeth into something interesting. I like to find a connection to someone, a commitment to a feeling and to a particular way of being in a situation so you're almost imprisoned in it."
Her second collaboration with Ozon offered the juicy role of a world-weary mystery novelist in the handsome, intriguing Swimming Pool. Did she base the character on any real-life writer? "We looked at lots of writers. The one I liked particularly was Patricia Highsmith. Francois wanted to talk to Ruth Rendell about it, and she was very miffed. When someone asked her about it later, she denied he ever tried to contact her."
Rampling gave one of her most understated yet powerfully expressive performances in her next film, as one of two characters caring for their disabled children in Gianni Amelio's honest, unsentimental The Keys to the House. "Amelio is a real master," she says. "In Italy the film was a huge success, but in France they seemed a bit scared of the subject."
Although she is off-screen for much of Dominik Moll's French movie, Lemming, which was selected to open the 2005 Cannes Film Festival, Rampling steals the picture as a woman unleashing her anger at her adulterous husband (Andre Dussolier) by splashing red wine over him at a dinner party.
"In fact, we had to shoot that scene quite a few times," she says with another hearty laugh. "I felt sorry for Andre. I could not get it right. I threw the wine one way and the other, and he would have to get washed down so we could do it again and again. And that was the first scene we did together. I spent our first day together on a film set chucking wine into his face."
She looks radiant and she remains passionate about her work. She has homes in Paris, where she was married to musician Jean-Michel Jarre for 20 years, and in London, where her son from her first marriage, Barnaby Southcombe, is preparing to direct his first feature film.
She talks enthusiastically about her three latest movies, to be released over the next year - Spanish director Julio Medem's reincarnation story, Chaotic Ana; Antoine de Caunes' French film, Perfect Discord, with veteran actor Jean Rochefort as her husband; and the new Francois Ozon film, Angel, with Romola Garai and Sam Neill.
"It's a period piece set in England, and the first English language film for Francois. It's a big costume drama, so it will be quite different from his other work. I play just a small part. I think he wanted me in it because I'm his mascot."
Heading South opened at the IFI in Dublin yesterday