In Charlotte Rampling’s home in Chelsea, London, on a dresser as if set apart, is a selection of framed photographs of two little girls, around four and six, dressed identically in gingham frocks, with the same cloched fair hair — a style preferred by the middle classes in the early 1950s — and the same neat bow to set it off.
In my mind, I see Charlotte, on the left, looking down, gravely perverse, whereas Sarah, her older sister, is smiling beguilingly out at the camera. Elsewhere, on the mantelpiece, on the bookshelves, there are photographs of Rampling’s children, her two sons and her ex-husband Jean-Michel Jarre’s daughter, whom she brought up.
Looking at the two little girls now, you can almost imagine that symbolic moment as the pictures were taken, the initial step into their own lives — maybe a dance class, a first day at school. But look again and you see, more than 50 years later, meaning held in reserve for the future. Sarah, dead for nearly 40 years. And then the Charlotte Rampling of today — pushing her grandson of a year or so through the streets of Chelsea, the gravity, if not the perversity, almost entirely abated.
Now, she looks happy. I have met her a few times over the past 15 years and I have never seen her happy. Of course, I’ve seen the look that she passed off as happiness, the look someone once described as her ”jade gaze” — a brilliant image. Jade is one of the hardest stones and, apparently, the easiest to fake — even carbon-14 dating can’t detect an antique jade, the real thing, from something fashioned yesterday.
Rampling has always had something exquisitely hard-boiled about her. And then there’s the voice with its strange, faraway quality — almost like an echo.
The first time I heard her say ”My sister died of a brain haemorrhage. She was in Argentina. She was 23,” I thought of Saul Bellow’s line: ”Some people just can’t grasp grief.” But then I saw her in François Ozon’s small, fragile masterpiece Under the Sand in 2001, and I knew I was wrong. Here was grief — numb, dumb, bewildered, blundering grief, grief that you don’t see often in movies.
In the film Rampling plays Marie, a middle-aged woman, apparently happily married, whose husband, Jean, swims out to sea and doesn’t return. Has he drowned? Has he committed suicide? There is a scene in which Marie stands in the mortuary over a putrefying corpse that may or may not be Jean. A protective mask conceals her mouth and nose. Only her eyes are there to convey the horror. The whole story is in those eyes.
Ozon described Under the Sand as really ”a documentary about Charlotte Rampling. She is very close to the character in the film, and I used Charlotte as she is in life. Glamorous, with a certain magic. But beneath is something you feel, very strong, very deep. Something she doesn’t show through actions or words. Feelings.”
Three years ago, I asked Rampling about Sarah’s death. She said: ”I made a pact with someone a very long time ago that I would never discuss this and I will not. My sister died of a brain haemorrhage, in Argentina, when she was 23. That is all.”
The interview ended awkwardly. So I was a bit surprised when she agreed, three years on, to another interview, this time to discuss Ozon’s new film, another film he has written specifically for her, Swimming Pool, his first film in English. In it, she plays, in her own words, someone ”repressed and bad-tempered, manipulative, frigid”.
It is a wonderful film, suffused with the light of Luberon, Provence, where it was shot. Rampling plays Sarah, a writer of thrillers, who goes to stay in her agent’s villa to try to get over a writing block. Into her self-imposed isolation comes an interloper, the agent’s daughter, Julie, played by the luminescent Ludivine Sagnier, a sort of submarine coquette who swims through the film like a glittering tropical fish. The pool is, I guess, a metaphor for the subconscious.
The tone of the film is a malevolent glee, and it is very funny to watch the interaction between these two actors, both of them dream women, perfect apparitions, real phantoms.
Swimming Pool plays around with versions of truth. Ozon is a master manipulator — another reason, no doubt, that he and Rampling get on so well. I came out of the film liking Rampling a great deal. I told her so when I met her again. I said I did not think she could be that likable.
”Ah,” she said. ”But I am not the same person that you met before. Something has unlocked that hadn’t unlocked when I saw you last … If you asked me [the same questions], I would now say different things.”
So I did ask her, the question I thought that she would never find it in herself to answer. What would she say now about the death of her sister? She didn’t pause or look remotely surprised. ”I would say that she committed suicide. She shot herself, in Argentina, she was 23. The son that she had just given birth to, prematurely, was still in hospital. Sarah’s husband rang my father. He didn’t tell me the truth for three years.” When he did, she says, ”We made a pact then that my mother would never know. But she died two years ago.”
Rampling held on to this secret for more than 30 years — years in which she married and divorced Bryan Southcombe, married Jarre. Had her children. Made her career. Suffered depression.
”I knew I was going to have a day of reckoning, all through my early 30s I knew, and I remember the day it happened, thinking, ‘Shit, here it comes.’ My second son was five, I was 35. And one day I had the worst feeling of dread … I’d thought everything in my life was hunky-dory, my life was great. And then it happened, that terror, and I was haunted from that moment.”
Yet at the time she projected a perfect life. ”I had to. I needed to create the perfect family in which nothing could go wrong …” And then she cracked, as she says, like a plate.
In 1984 she began to seek treatment for depression. In 1995, her marriage to Jarre ended when he was seen booking himself into a Paris hotel with a young woman. Rampling doesn’t think of it as a betrayal. ”He did everything he could. We are friends, thank goodness.”
Now, she says, her father ”had no right actually not to allow my mother to cope with the truth”. Certainly she never coped with the lie. Soon after her daughter’s death, she had a stroke and stopped speaking. ”She came in and out of various stages of staggering grief.” The last nine years of her life she sat motionless in a chair, ”like a little bird”, her hands held tight to each side like claws. As if trying to get a hold on something.
”A suicide is a reality,” says Rampling. ”But if reality is not let in, if it’s kept in the dark, then that is where the secret draws its power. It draws all strength to itself and to the keeping of the secret.”
The secret was confided to her in 1969 — four years after she made The Knack, three years after Georgy Girl, in which she was the embodiment of the artless vanity of the swinging Sixties, always a bit perverse, always provocative.
In 1969, she made Luchino Visconti’s The Damned, with Dirk Bogarde, and began not so much a flirtation, more a self-flagellation, with stylised and fetishistic decadence. Then, in 1974, came The Night Porter, again with Bogarde, in which he plays a former Nazi concentration camp guard, and she Lucia, the former Nazi victim, reunited 12 years later in a Vienna hotel. Bogarde refused to take the part unless Rampling, still relatively unknown at the time, was his partner.
This film, with its implicit message that there is a complicity between victimiser and victim, became the film that mapped Rampling’s screen persona for nearly three decades. She was Lucia, that strange fusion in all her films of amorality and innocence.
She has always looked in any film as if she were ignoring her audience. She is. She has said often, ”What I am doing is not acting. I am simply playing myself.” And this is partly true. In many of her films — Zardoz, Angel Heart, The Damned, even The Night Porter — she has been little more than an abstraction. Nagisa Oshima’s Max, Mon Amour, in which she is a diplomat’s wife who falls in love with a chimpanzee, is perhaps the worst.
She has worked with some of the great directors, but you sense she has never given what they wanted. Or, what she could give them, they didn’t comprehend. Yet she has great screen presence, and she is one of the few actors who never seemed to pass moral judgement on any character she plays. She didn’t care if you loved her or hated her.
Moral coolness, then, became her touchstone. Reviews refer to her chill, her ice, her aloofness — all abstraction, or maybe distraction. Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories is the notable exception. He knew how to make the abstraction work — through irony, itself a form of abstraction. As Dorrie, the neurotic, drug-addicted girlfriend of Allen’s film director Sandy Bates, she is for the first time heartbreaking.
It is worth wondering what would have happened if Ozon, then 32, had not come along. But along he came, and not a moment too soon. Taken together, the two films Rampling has made with him dramatise the central story of her life. Of course, he is far too modest to say that he offered her a way out.
”I thought with Charlotte, after Under the Sand, that there was some kind of rebirth,” he says. ”And she is so full of mysterious things. I realised that if I asked her to do something ordinary, like Sarah, it would be magic with her.”
She took what he offered. And it is like magic. He made Rampling, at the age of 58, an actor. She says it herself: ”I am acting in this film” — a film about different kinds of immersion — in the self, in work, in the swimming pool.
And Rampling immerses herself in the role of Sarah, fascinated by another woman who perhaps represents what she might have been.
She named her part after her sister. ”I thought that after such a very long time of not letting her be with me that I would like to bring her back into my life.” — Â