![]() She was promoting the film in New York in November when I sat down with her for the following interview.Ĭineaste: What prompted you to participate in The Look ? Did you think it was time to put some thoughts on record?Ĭharlotte Rampling: It certainly wasn’t me thinking that. Perhaps because Rampling had final cut, the piece is not as revealing as one might want it to be, but it gives a fair idea of Rampling’s thoughts and feelings about her vocation and her uneasy existence. It consists of nine chapters, in which the subject discusses subjects like “Exposure,” “Age,” “Beauty,” and “Demons” with various friends, including the novelist Paul Auster and the artist-photographer Juergen Teller. Her most recent film is a documentary self-portrait, The Look: Charlotte Rampling (2011), directed by Angelina Maccarone. She remains diverse in her mid-sixties: affectingly delivering the interior monologues of the Flemish Virgin Mary, fearful for her son, in The Mill and the Cross (2011), and as disturbing as ever demolishing the concept of marriage at her manic-depressive youngest daughter’s wedding reception in Melancholia (2011). She was the social-climbing mother in The Duchess (2008), another sexual predator-and altogether demonic-in Todd Solondz’s Life During Wartime (2009), and the deceiving headmistress in Never Let Me Go (2010). ![]() Her portrayal of the Wellesley professor who pays for sex with young Haitian boys in Heading South (2005) was one of her most satisfyingly complex. She was deeply moving as a woman coming to terms with widowhood in François Ozon’s Under the Sand (2000), one of her more sympathetic characters and at her brittle best in Ozon’s Swimming Pool (2003), as the lonely vacationing novelist who fantasizes into life a Bardotesque slattern (Ludivine Sagnier) and a disposable homme moyen sensuel. It was in the 00s that she revealed she had become a great actress. She was particularly memorable in three costume dramas: The Wings of the Dove (1997) Great Expectations (1999)-she is the most morose Miss Havisham of all and The Cherry Orchard (1999). Her Nineties work demonstrated her admirable catholicity, though not many of her films opened here at that time. Working steadily, she was a chilly diplomat’s wife in love with a chimpanzee in Nagisa Oshima’s Buñuelian Max, Mon Amour (1986), but it was more bizarre to find her playing a Thatcherite politician-and looking the part-in Paris By Night (1988). She made a few forays to America, playing the slinky, amoral Velma opposite Robert Mitchum’s Philip Marlowe in Farewell, My Lovely (1974) and the woman who cruelly betrays Paul Newman’s lawyer in The Verdict (1982). guards as she sings a Dietrich song, was the first indication that she had a taste for perversity. The latter, a serious if morally dubious film that had the seminaked Rampling sashaying around S.S. The most farsighted of the British actresses who emerged in the mid-Sixties, she quickly broke with swinging London, segueing from her bitchy gadabout in Georgy Girl (1966) to a paranoid Englishwoman in Sardinia in Sequestra di Persona (1969), and then to victims of Nazism in Luchino Visconti’s The Damned (1969) and Liliana Caviani’s The Night Porter (1974), in which, definingly, she was the menaced death-camp prostitute who embarks on a postwar affair with her tormentor. Instead of seeking out conventional heroine roles she looked for victims, neurotics, and femmes fatales. ![]() Intimidatingly rather than comfortingly beautiful, Rampling (born in the village of Sturmer, in Essex, England, in 1946) recognized early on that her antagonistic aura recommended her for character parts. Sandy was played by Allen himself and Dorrie by Charlotte Rampling who, with those words-fall in love with me at your peril-summed up the dangerous appeal that has characterized most of the women she has portrayed since she made her film debut in The Knack…and How to Get It (1965). ![]() “I’m fascinating but I’m trouble,” says the actress Dorrie on being approached for the first time by her director, Sandy Bates, in Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories (1980). Looking for the Alchemy: An Interview with Charlotte Rampling (Web Exclusive)
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