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Photograph by Paolo Roversi. Styled by Jonathan Kaye |
Charlotte Rampling’s Unknowable Truth
For more than 50 years, the actress has seduced men and women alike with her cool, distant beauty. But what if all that time we were wrong?
Charlotte Rampling’s reputation doesn’t entirely make sense. She is an actress of extraordinary intelligence and sensitivity, with a rare, charismatic beauty and sexual force that has lasted well into her 60s. Her career began at 17, when she was spotted in a secretarial pool by an ad man who worked upstairs; she went with enchanted speed from a bit actor in a Cadbury commercial to full-on celebrity in 1966 with the modish hit ‘‘Georgy Girl.’’ Over the last half-century, she has made more than a hundred films and TV shows, a career now crowned by Andrew Haigh’s ‘‘45 Years,’’ an emotional tour de force reminiscent of James Joyce’s ‘‘The Dead’’ (the story, not the Huston film) in its quiet, quotidian pace and evocation of the past’s devastating romantic power. Rampling has been rightly celebrated for her remarkable body of work, but she’s also been labeled as ‘‘cold,’’ ‘‘imperious,’’ ‘‘detached,’’ ‘‘watchful,’’ ‘‘hard to get close to,’’ ‘‘mysterious’’ and ‘‘aloof.’’ In the countless interviews she’s done, reporters have described her with a mixture of awe and anxiety, sometimes casting her as a bit of a mental case as they unknowingly behave like mental cases themselves.
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| Charlotte Rampling graces the cover of our Dec. 5 Holiday issue |
‘‘When I first sit down across from her, I can’t help but worry that Rampling is not coping with anything at all very well,’’ a journalist wrote in 2001, right before going on to express his exasperation at Rampling for being ‘‘stoic’’ about her ex-husband Jean-Michel Jarre’s infidelity. In 2014, a different journalist wondered at how ‘‘closed-off’’ Rampling has ‘‘always been as an actress,’’ speculating that this trait might be connected with having kept her sister’s suicide a secret for 20 years.
Of course, it is now normal for celebrities to share the most private details of their lives with the press, and Rampling’s has been the kind of wild, coruscating blur of high glamour and success that makes journalists vibrate. The daughter of a manufacturing heiress and an Olympic gold medalist, Rampling, who was born in 1946 in Sturmer, England, was educated at a posh nearby private school called St. Hilda’s and later at Jeanne d’Arc Academie pour Jeunes Filles in Versailles. Her adult life has been marked by loss, most cruelly of her sister, but also of two husbands: She left her first marriage, of four years, to Bryan Southcombe when she met the French electronic music composer Jean-Michel Jarre at a party in St. Tropez in ’76. She had a luxurious life with Jarre in a mansion in Versailles, but suffered from depression that descended into a breakdown in 1988, and didn’t recover until the mid-’90s — around the time she learned of Jarre’s affair from a tabloid. Through all of this she kept working, and in 2000 she became a star again when the young director François Ozon sought her out as the lead in his death-haunted drama ‘‘Under the Sand.’’ At 54, Rampling was once again in the spotlight, this time with the full force of her maturity behind her, still beautiful, still potent.
Hers, in other words, is the story of a real-life heroine. But the more I read the repeated interrogations of her marriages, the breakdowns, the triumphs, the secret held and finally revealed, the smoldering sexuality, the more annoyed I grew to see this artist’s life turned into a media soap opera which, even if factually presented, I suspected had little to do with the actual woman.
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My response was not to find out who the ‘‘actual’’ woman was, but to let her be. I decided that during our interview, I would ask her no personal questions at all — well, maybe one or two, if we were really getting along. Then I learned that her partner of 20 years, the French businessman Jean-Noël Tassez, had died roughly three weeks before our meeting, at which point I, too, became a mental-case journalist. How could I say anything about the situation? How could I not say anything about the situation? What if she wanted to talk about it? Should we meet at all?
I walked into the bar of the Hôtel Costes in Paris on an October afternoon rendered awkward by the intensity of my desire to relate to her in an appropriate way — that is, not to intrude on her grief. She was there when I arrived, so I didn’t get to see her entrance, but she did not seem like the kind of person who ‘‘makes an entrance.’’ She looked like a quiet, self-possessed older lady with either excellent posture or very erect inner turgor or both. I sat down and said something sincere and clumsy about how I knew she was going through a hard time and that I was concerned about blundering into things I shouldn’t touch. ‘‘If you do that, I will stop you,’’ she replied. ‘‘If you ask anything I don’t like, I’ll step around it and go on. I can take care of myself.’’
When I repeated this to an acquaintance he said, ‘‘There’s the coldness.’’ But that’s not how it felt. Her words had the reassuring quality of clear communication. They put me at ease. I asked her general questions and although she couldn’t always answer them, she always engaged them. (One thing to be said for nosy personal questions: They can actually be answered.) We talked about her persona: ‘‘I’ve always, since the beginning, had my antenna out, like, ‘You can’t get me.’ It makes you more interesting when people know they can’t get you.’’ We talked about the creative relationship strength has with weakness: ‘‘The strong part is careful not to take over. It needs to hold itself in check because I want the weaker, fragile part to have the same form of expression.’’ We talked about some of her many standout roles: as a woman nearly unhinged by grief in Ozon’s ‘‘Under the Sand’’; as the cynical queen-bee of a Haitian beach resort catering to middle-aged female sexual tourists in Laurent Cantet’s 2005 film ‘‘Heading South’’; as a young concentration camp prisoner trapped in an S-and-M arrangement with a sadistic guard in Liliana Cavani’s 1974 film ‘‘The Night Porter.’’
This movie, still her most notorious and defining role, was critically excoriated when it was released in America; Roger Ebert, Pauline Kael and Susan Sontag were all disgusted to the point of contempt. Even Rampling’s admirers have dismissed it as sensationalism. Yet Rampling still considers it one of her most powerful performances, and I agree. While the characters as written can be summed up as pornographic clichés, the way Rampling and her co-star Dirk Bogarde played them was almost weirdly nuanced. During their first encounter, as Bogarde is pulling a pale chemise over her head, Rampling gazes at him with stunned fear and passivity; there is also a hint of perverse bonding and understanding, as well as something more intense: the look of a trapped animal showing a submissive face while it prepares its next move. Throughout the film, Rampling bodily expressed these myriad shades of feeling, from terror to arousal to rage to pure survival instinct, happening so closely together that the girl herself doesn’t seem to know what she feels — and neither do we, even as we react. Thus Rampling amplified what was to critics the most offensive theme of the movie: the joining of beauty and cruelty, the communication between ungiving power and the soft, dumb knowledge of the body.
Rampling’s trajectory from her early films to the movies she made in her late 50s has been characterized as a transition from merely playing her cold sexy self to learning to act — or being taught how, as one writer absurdly suggested, by the much less experienced Ozon. But Rampling has consistently shown her ability to subtly dramatize strong, sometimes contradictory inner states. In her later films, she can command the viewer’s interest simply by walking down a street or lying alone in a bed — but she has possessed this command from the start.
Some reviewers attribute this ability to her mysterious, preternatural charisma and abiding beauty, and that is part of it. But it is also her actively focused talent for the natural representation of real people. We don’t notice how expressive ordinary people are unless we love them enough (or are frightened enough by them) to pay real attention. But everyone is uniquely expressive, even in the smallest gestures. We are so immersed in the parade of character in daily life that we don’t typically see this unless it startles us; we don’t have time to notice all the things that people are telling us. When we see this ordinary expressiveness through a camera’s lens, however, it is amazing, even if what is being conveyed is pure realism heightened just slightly through disciplined art. ‘‘45 Years,’’ for instance, is made of small movements and gestures that reflect big emotional shifts, the kind that alter lives. Rampling plays a retired teacher named Kate Mercer who, in the opening scene, returns home with a letter for her husband, Geoff (Tom Courtenay), that has arrived from Switzerland. He reads it aloud and says, ‘‘They found her.’’ ‘‘Found who?’’ she asks. ‘‘They found Katya ... my Katya,’’ a girl with whom he climbed a mountain before he met his wife of nearly half a century, a girl who fell to her death and who has just now been discovered preserved in ice.
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Because its core meaning pivots on a small revelation so quick not everyone will see it, I don’t want to describe the story further. But I feel compelled to say that Kate’s final gesture at the end is a wonderful stroke of direction that Rampling executes unerringly, saying more by jerking down her arm than most actors can reveal in an entire scene. The movie’s themes are subtle and subjective; for Rampling they can be described as the consequence of unfinished business. ‘‘There are things Kate has compromised on, and that’s fine — that’s what people do, because they don’t want to rock the boat. A lot of women are like that,’’ she said. ‘‘Then this thing happens, it all comes up to the surface, and she doesn’t want to face it. She doesn’t even know what she’s got to face.’’ In other words, Rampling isn’t being mysterious as much as she is revealing the mystery of us all.
‘‘Creative expression comes from places we don’t know,’’ she continued. ‘‘When I started out early in films, people said, ‘Oh my gosh, you can do this.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I can.’ I don’t know why, but I knew I could. I can’t explain what it is and how you get there, but it’s not anything to do with the intellect. I wanted to get to the being state of a character. Just watching someone being, living.’’
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Helmut Newton “Charlotte Rampling, Hotel Nord-Pinus, Arles, 1973 |
Maybe that is when she looked directly at me for the first time; I’m not sure. I probably don’t remember, because even when she didn’t meet my gaze, she felt more present than most people. Eyes up or down, she smiled easily, especially when I mentioned one of her more obscure films, ‘‘Max Mon Amour,’’ in which she plays a diplomat’s wife having an affair with a chimpanzee. The story is a delightful evocation of blunt, innocent feeling up against the hard norms of human society. It’s something like the anti-‘‘King Kong,’’ for although attempts are made on Max’s life, in the end he’s riding through Paris on the top of the family car, being cheered by crowds.
Such a goofy story seems out of keeping, except when you remember that Rampling’s persona is very ‘‘you can’t get me.’’ ‘‘Max’’ is like a prank, someone pulling a face, but it is also very much in line with a thematic current that connects her characters. You almost can’t imagine what is beneath the pleasant social exterior of the wife in ‘‘Under the Sand’’ until her husband’s disappearance, which foregrounds her vulnerable inner world so profoundly that her public self suddenly seems revealed as a shell. Similarly, Kate, the heroine of ‘‘45 Years,’’ faced with a disruption from the past which feels seismic, tries to hold it in check by putting on the uniform of her social role with the same sad rigor that the former camp guard puts on his literal uniform at the end of ‘‘The Night Porter.’’
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| Charlotte Rampling |
On Set | Charlotte Rampling
On the set of T’s cover shoot, the photographer Paolo Roversi captured Charlotte Rampling in a silent film.
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Hair by Julien d’Ys. Makeup by Mary Greenwell at Premier Hair and Make-up using Chanel Les Beiges. Production: Prodn Paris. Executive producer: Jill Caytan. Producer: Miren Lasa. Manicurist: Typhaine Kersual at Jed Root. Digital operator: Antonio Pizzichino at Dtouch. Photographer’s assistants: Mélanie Rey and Arthur Ancelot. Stylist’s assistant: Max Ortega Govela. Tailor: Carole Savaton. Hair assistant: Ilker Akyol
THE NEW YORK TIMES
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