Scribble, Scribble, Scribble

by Simon Schama

  Call me a cynic, but is there not a smidgen of disingenuousness here? Is she not – for all her smouldering disdain through photoshoots – just the teeniest bit complicit in this perennial curiosity about whether she still has ‘the Look’? (She does.) Doesn’t she actually enjoy the gasps of disbelief that the body which in the 1970s turned men into warm puddles on the floor is still, at sixty-three, a thing of beauty? Probably. But you believe her when, tightening her lip a little and making a face as though she’s swallowed something dodgy, she talks wanly of the rounds of film promotion – talks, that is, while avoiding eye contact and mostly directing her words diagonally across me to the restaurant wall. Still, at the start of a year that promises a number of high-profile Rampling performances – in films including an adaptation this September of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, co-starring Keira Knightley and Carey Mulligan; Danny Moynihan’s satire on the London art scene, Boogie Woogie, in spring; and, coming this autumn, the latest from American auteur Todd Solondz, Life During Wartime – she will surely have to gird herself for the inevitable run of ‘exposure’.

  For a time, installed in a corner booth at the upscale London restaurant where we have agreed to meet, we just contend in awkwardness; she doing her cat impersonation, me the floppy old terrier who just wants to woof and play. But then, when I ask her in earnest (for this is what actually interests me) about how she came to be the mind-blowingly great actress she is, she emerges from under the hedge of her frowning, and turns directly towards me as if surprised that anyone – for a magazine article – would want to talk about how she came by her craft.

  Then it suddenly becomes a very different story; a story, in fact, of how her life and art have flowed into each other, for she’s not shy about talking about some chapters – at least of her own family history, rather than her married life and loves – weighted though it is with trouble and sorrow.

  Her father Godfrey Rampling died last year (aged 100), and no degree in advanced psychoanalysis is needed to understand that he was the true north on Rampling’s compass. It was from him she got her backbone and physical bravery. ‘Made you climb walls, did he?’ ‘Oh, everything,’ she says, ‘We [she and her sister] couldn’t be wimps.’ He saw in Charlotte the tomboy; the fighter, the one who in some way might be an athlete. Godfrey ran the second leg in the 400-metres relay at the notorious Berlin Olympics of 1936, and is captured in Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia winning the gold for Britain. The runner immediately behind him had fallen ill and was way behind when Godfrey took the baton and carved his way through the pack. ‘He was beautiful,’ Rampling emphasises, looking wistfully into the distance. ‘They said he ran like a god, and they were right.’ He paid a price for his heroics. A leg went out, and was never quite the same again.

  Rampling was born ten years later, in Sturmer, Essex (I greet her as a fellow Essexian and she smiles in mildly snobbish surprise, ‘Really?’). Her father had already become remote or, in her own word, ‘frightening’, disappearing into silent distances that seem to have translated into emotional intimidation. In fact, he was as much frightened as the frightener. ‘Of what?’ ‘A haunting,’ says Rampling, sighing a little. ‘He began to carry the weight of the world on his shoulders.’ The load of it crushed him into periodic depressions, which his daughter felt the burden of, growing up first in Fontainebleau, where her father was stationed for NATO as a lieutenant colonel with the Royal Artillery (and where she was part-educated, becoming fluent in French); and perhaps even later, at a distance, at the girls’ boarding school St Hilda’s in Bushey, Hertfordshire.

  The playpen of the late Sixties was, of course, the antidote to all this patriarchal gloom, and like so many other cool stunners, Rampling played hard. ‘I did everything very young,’ she says. She worked as a model before being spotted in a Cadbury commercial and cast in Silvio Narizzano’s 1966 classic Georgy Girl as the impossibly fine-boned, hard, hot number, against Lynn Redgrave’s adorable dumpy duckling who eventually gets the man.

  Then came the shattering moment when the Swinging stopped. Her twenty-three-year-old older sister Sarah fell ill while pregnant, gave birth prematurely, fell into a steep depression and shot herself. Shortly after, their mother, who had always been very close to Sarah, suffered a stroke, and was left severely disabled. In a matter of weeks, Rampling, now in her early twenties and with the world about to be at her feet, was robbed of the two people she loved most in the world. (Her grief was disrupted by her father’s insistence, so as not to upset her mother during her long, painful rehabilitation, that the truth of Sarah’s suicide remain a secret. The official version would be that she suffered a cerebral haemorrhage.)

  It’s not surprising that acting became a way of changing the subject, moving into someone else’s skin. If the part called for it, Rampling would do pain, not be its victim. It was while she was shooting an Italian film with Gianfranco Mingozzi in 1968 that Luchino Visconti spotted her and cast her in The Damned, his epic tale of dynastic corruption at the beginning of the Third Reich. As the Jewish daughter-in-law of the only liberal scion of the family, Rampling was pitch-perfect: tender, poignant and desperate (a rebuttal to those who think of her as mostly sexy-tough). I tell her that I’ve always thought one of the remarkable things about her career has been its range; and though it’s the truth, this is not something she’s used to hearing.

  It’s a paradox. On the one hand, she insists that somehow there has to be something in the part that is also of her. On the other hand, she was crucially guided by Visconti to understand the psychological morphing needed to make a performance credible. (We enjoy a brief Visconti love-in when I reveal that some of my earliest movie passions as a teenager were La Terra Trema and, especially, Rocco and His Brothers, which took me weeks – if ever – to get over.) When she murmurs of his charisma and handsome, Marxist-aristo charm, it’s obvious that he became for her the warm-blooded fatherly mentor. When, in The Damned, she had to play a scene pleading for the life of her children, she went to Visconti in despair, saying she had no idea how to do it, that she couldn’t do it. ‘Listen, Charlotte,’ he said, ‘you don’t have to have done anything like this. You must just believe you have done it.’ Later, standing right beside the camera as she acted, he urged her: ‘See behind the eyes. See behind the eyes . . .’

  Without Visconti’s guiding hand, then, there would have been no Night Porter and no international fame. It was Dirk Bogarde, the tortured male lead in The Damned, who saw she could play something quite different, and working with the director Liliana Cavani devised the script and plot for the strange, terrifying, sadomasochistic fantasy that became The Night Porter. Rampling recalls putting Visconti’s advice to the test early by having to do, right at the start of the shoot, ‘the fucking concentration-camp scene. I had to sing.’

  For all the thunderstruck acclaim she received for the film, life was not altogether plain sailing. Many parts came along, many of them mediocre. Her first marriage (to actor Bryan Southcombe) broke up when she fell headlong for rock composer Jean Michel Jarre. It was mega-force love, and articles regularly appeared about the Beautiful Couple’s romantic life in Paris. But every so often, in the 1980s, she would hit a reef, falling into what sounds like the same depression experienced by her father. Being cared for by her husband, she’d recover, only to sink into the terror of its return.

  There must have been a moment when Jarre had had enough, as he took up with a younger civil servant, and in 1997 Rampling’s second marriage ended. Then, in 2001, her mother died, and it freed something up in her. She became much closer to her father, moved by his kindness and love for her mother. (‘It was his redemption,’ she says.) And, when the truth about her sister’s suicide was let out, she was at last allowed to grieve.

  The join between Rampling’s emotional life and working life became sewn together by the great French indie director François Ozon. She says, looking back on her career, that her best films have been ‘a documentary of me’. (Indeed, without the dee
p stain of her personal drama, her acting would just be an affectation, the calculated projection of ‘the Look’.) But in her two films for Ozon, Under the Sand (2000) and Swimming Pool (2003), she reached for, and achieved, something much more profound: the sensuality of melancholy; the embodiment of the angry wound.

  In Under the Sand especially, in which she plays a childless, affectionate wife whose husband disappears on a beach in south-west France while she has her eyes closed sunbathing, Rampling’s capacity to play the light moments – bursts of wilt-inducing laughter in the midst of sex, breezy certainty in the gathering distress – give the drama its full tragic force.

  She also loved playing Miss Havisham in a BBC adaptation of Great Expectations, reading Dickens and looking up David Lean’s classic to prep; and had the part of graceful, sexually potent middle age nailed. ‘They suited me,’ she says of roles in films like Laurent Cantet’s 2005 Heading South, about a professor who travels to Haiti for sex with the local young men.

  But you somehow don’t want Rampling just to corner the market in sexually compulsive crosspatches, though she is said to perform brilliantly in a hotel-bedroom scene as a rich, unhappy sexual predator in the upcoming Life During Wartime. Still, the work she has done lately – including a feature about street dancers in England called StreetDance; Never Let Me Go, in which she plays the enigmatic and haunted headmistress Miss Emily; and a comic turn in Boogie Woogie – seems to draw on that capacity for range that Visconti first saw in her. ‘But I just don’t get that many parts,’ she says, ‘not the scripts I can be bothered with.’ After her sister died, she swore she would not make films ‘just to entertain’. And if there have been projects in the past that have fallen short of that lofty principle, there’s no doubt that, in her early sixties, she no longer has truck with the mediocre.

  It’s dark now, out there on the rain-slick London street; and gradually the lights are being dimmed in the Italian restaurant. The tape recorder goes off. I order glasses of white wine. She demurs for a second and then is happy when I overrule her. She is off later to see her friend Kevin Spacey’s play of Inherit the Wind at the Old Vic. With her velvety voice, it’s not surprising she has done theatre both in London and Paris – a Marivaux and the unedited, terrifying version of Strindberg’s Dance of Death. But now she wants to talk a bit about my childhood, not hers, and we do, friendliness replacing professional curiosity. She has stopped looking at the wall. ‘What am I going to do to pass the time?’ she teases, giving me the full-on charm. I am speechless. Then the angel passes, and back comes a self-satirising version of Grumpy Puss. ‘Will it be good?’ she worries of the play. It’s the audience, not the actors, she’s already taking exception to. The massed sitting, the clapping . . . ‘You know I hate places where people all do the same thing.’ The fact that she laughs at her own vehemence is a sure sign she really means it.

  Clio at the Multiplex

  New Yorker, 19 January 1998

  ‘We have come to understand that who we are is who we were,’ says Anthony Hopkins, impersonating John Quincy Adams at the climactic moment of Steven Spielberg’s Amistad. He says this in front of a bust of his father, John Adams, seen in soft focus. A muted trumpet sounds over the rhetoric, vaguely invoking patriotic sacrifice. Hearts around the theatre swell like popcorn. In reality, Adams’s address to the bench on behalf of the abducted Africans of the Amistad took eight hours, spread over two days. Spielberg works on a broad canvas, but not that broad. His movie boils the speech down to a five-minute appeal to the Founding Fathers, and, in particular, a cheerful assertion of the compatibility of liberty and equality enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. When Jefferson duly appears (in bust form), we are evidently not meant to think of the unrepentant Virginia slave-holder. In fact, since the closing speech does little else but make that ringing appeal to ancestor worship, we’re asked to believe that it was enough to sway the justices (the majority of them slave-holders) into upholding the decision of the Connecticut court, thereby freeing the captives.

  As a clinching argument about the legality of treating the Africans as born slaves or born free, this makes no sense, not least because the case turned neither on the morality nor on the legality of slavery in America, but on the slave trade on the high seas. The Amistad Africans had been abducted from a British protectorate and shipped to a Spanish colony in clear violation of a treaty between the two kingdoms which prohibited the traffic. John Quincy Adams did end his great address with an appeal to the past, but it was an appeal to the independence of the Supreme Court, and invoked John Marshall and his colleagues, men apparently with too little name-recognition for Hollywood. As for his peroration, ‘I can only ejaculate a fervent petition to Heaven that every member [of the Court] may go to his final account with as little of earthly frailty to answer for as those illustrious dead’, it, too, may not have the ring of the box office, but it was a masterpiece of psychological cunning. One of the most odiously adamant of the Southern Justices, Philip Barbour, died in his sleep between the beginning and the end of Adams’s speech, thus presenting Adams with a perfect opportunity to remind the rest of the bench of an even Supremer Court waiting for them.

  It’s an opportunity that Spielberg passes up. Instead, he concocts the feel-good fantasy that JQA’s appeal to ancestry was borrowed from Cinque, the leader of the shipboard slave rising – that between the Mende wise man and the Massachusetts rationalist (the two never met) there existed the unspoken bond of warriors for freedom. Possibly the most important moment in the movie is also the most fabulously fictitious. Cinque, sitting in Adams’s library (in those far-off days presidential libraries were places where ex-presidents actually read books), reassures his champion that they will not go into court alone. ‘No, no, we have right at our side,’ Adams says hurriedly. ‘No,’ Cinque gently admonishes the ex-President. ‘I meant my ancestors . . . I will call into the past . . . and beg them to come . . . And they must come, for at this moment, I am the whole reason they have existed at all.’ Adams stares back at Cinque, mutely grateful for the insight. His eyes water with deferential illumination. Spielberg holds the shot and holds the shot, flagging its Significance.

  You can’t altogether blame Steven Spielberg for the piety. As a relatively recent convert to ancestor worship himself, he seems to have realised that in late-second-millennium America he has his work cut out for him, and he has applied his brilliance as a storyteller to getting it done. But lining up a row of busts of the Founding Fathers as a way of cueing up patriotic nostalgia only brings the difficulty of history-in-America into sharper focus. After all, those same patriarchs were in the business of repudiating, not venerating, the past – of creating a nation that was conspicuously liberated from the weight of the past’s authority. And at the same time that the film invokes the need to keep the memory of national history alive, it has a lot of fun with America’s invention of political modernity. Martin Van Buren, looking like an affable chipmunk in Nigel Hawthorne’s enactment (the real Adams, dedicated to vigorous swims in the Potomac, called Van Buren ‘inordinately fat’), is gleefully depicted as the archetypal creature of the hustings, complete with baby-kissing and Nixonian full-arm salutes, a deliberate contrast with the flinty, philosophical JQA. Yet Adams, after his own blighted presidential tenure, showed himself to be a belated but adept convert to political populism, jumping into the muckiest popular campaign of his day – anti-Masonry.

  So when Hollywood history claims that in ancestor veneration lies our redemption from the culture of the short shelf life, it only sort of means it. Amistad is just the most recent, and most impressive, example of filmed history as costume civics, chronicles of latter-day saints and martyrs, right in line with Glory, Malcolm X and Michael Collins. If movie history is to get produced as box office with a conscience, it must serve one of two purposes: explain the Origins of Us or act as Augury of What Is to Come. But this kind of history, whether designed as the genealogy of identity politics or as prudential political-inve
stment service, seldom escapes the contemporary world that it claims to transcend. Even in a production as painstakingly researched as Amistad, entrapment within the contemporary is suggested by a multiplicity of careless details, not enough in themselves for any except the most pedantically correct historian to get steamed over, but cumulatively betraying a tin ear for the obstinate otherness of the past. While both the nocturnal shipboard musical party that sails past the newly liberated Amistad and the velocipede that rides past the astonished Africans who thought themselves home carry a certificate of impeccable research, the film’s writers hardly notice (any more, I guess, than the audience does) utterances inconceivable in 1839. ‘Sure you do,’ Pete Postlethwaite says when Cinque denies knowing anything much about African domestic slavery. ‘Yesss!’ the defence team cheers when it wins its verdict in court. ‘Is there anything as pathetic as an ex-President?’ jeers a member of Van Buren’s entourage, meaning John Quincy Adams. In 1839, that would have been an expression of sympathy, not of derision.

  But perhaps the writers did notice all these details and intend them to narrow the distance between the past and the present, making history more user-friendly. This would explain the relentless tide of tepidly inspirational chorales that washes over the action, much like the musical accompaniment to a Party Convention bio-documentary eulogising the nominee: Sigh here. Weep here. Chuckle here. Amen! here. Hence, too, some of the casting, which recycles familiar faces in the roles to which previous Hollywood productions have assigned them. Meet Morgan Freeman once again as the noble but uneasy intermediary between white and black culture. Say hello to Matthew McConaughey as the cutely presumptuous lawyer, whose courtroom savvy is belied by his rumpled but winsome demeanour. (The real Roger Baldwin was a distinguished advocate, a Yale man, and the grandson of a signer of the Declaration of Independence.) Most peculiar of all, the urge for familiarity seems to involve the assumption that history, especially American history, calls for Brits in costume, Masterpiece thespians, thereby giving the unintended impression that the Revolution never actually happened.