Diane Keaton on Woody Allen, Annie Hall and new film Hampstead

Diane Keaton has never really put a certain role behind her.

Diane Keaton and Brendan Gleeson in Hampstead.

Well, la-dee-da, Annie Hall has made it to Hampstead at last. It has been a long wait, and in the time since Diane Keaton, as goofy, wonderful Annie, wooed Woody Allen’s neurotic, oversexed Alvy Singer over some feral lobsters in a Manhattan kitchen the north London village has changed.

Annie Hall was released 40 years ago and while in 1977 Hampstead’s pubs and cafes would have hosted some wannabe Annies and Alvys, now the bohemian vibe has drifted elsewhere; stand-ups and aspiring jazz singers don’t live in Hampstead unless they inherited the trust fund as well as the arty genes.

Here is, however, Keaton in Hampstead, a new British comedy directed by Joel Hopkins. The film is (extremely loosely) based on the real story of “Harry the Hermit”, or Harry Hallowes, who lived for more than 25 years in a ramshackle encampment on Hampstead Heath. He eventually gained squatters’ rights to the land through a court order after developers threatened to demolish his patch and turn it into luxury housing. The land Hallowes had a legal claim to was worth as much as £3.5 million, according to some estimates. Hallowes died in 2015 at 79, having been dubbed “Britain’s richest tramp”, but not before a cheery reporter from The Times informed him in his foxhole that a film was to be made of his life, with Keaton as his love interest. “I’ve never heard of the woman,” he snarled, which suggested that not only was Harry the Hermit not an Allen fan but hadn’t even seen The Godfather, which takes Hampstead snobbishness to a new level.

“Good for him,” beams Keaton, who despite having starred in films with a combined box-office haul of more than $US1.3 billion, sometimes doesn’t seem to have heard of Keaton the movie star either. Certainly her children, Dexter, 21, and Duke, 16, whom she adopted in her 50s, haven’t. “I don’t play the films to my kids, we’ve never gone to any of my movies — it’s so boring for them. To see me in the light of something like that …”

Keaton is 71 and looks fantastic. Not much has changed, style-wise, since Allen told her to turn up on the set of Annie Hall wearing what she wanted to wear. She is sporting a fitted coat with a huge belt over a shirt with a high collar (a Keaton trademark), what looks like men’s suit trousers rolled up to her calves, and huge black platform boots. We’re in a hotel in Soho, which is where she really likes to be when in London, “right in the centre”.

Hampstead itself came as something of a disappointment to her. “I thought it was charming, but I thought it was going to be slightly more unusual. It’s just real­ly pretty, nice architecture …” She doesn’t sound enraptured. “Maybe I didn’t see enough of it. I didn’t spend the night there.”

Hopkins’s film certainly has done its best to do a Notting Hill, erasing Hampstead’s mobile phone shops and estate agents and replacing them with patis­series and indie boutiques. Keaton’s Emily (wholly invented) is an impoverished American widow who volunteers at a charity shop, is nagged by her son (Grantchester’s James Norton), amorously lunched by a devious accountant and harassed by the nimbyish residents’ association of her mansion block. Love strikes when Emily sees Brendan Gleeson’s grumpy Irish hermit bathing naked in the heath ponds.

Diane Keaton in Hampstead.

It’s a role to which Keaton brings her well-honed tenderness and bafflement: an oddball wearing her kookiness as armour. “Emily is friendly, she has an affable personality, but there are many things that are going on inside of her that really need fixing bad. I saw her as someone who needed to take a long, hard look at who she was, not just seeing herself as a poor thing.”

I confess to Keaton that her trysts with Gleeson seemed a bit tame: one minute they are picnicking on Karl Marx’s grave, the next they’re waking up in bed together. Where was the foreplay? She squeals. “Can you imagine? Oh my god.” Chewing over it, however, she agrees. “It wasn’t there. I don’t know why. I think you’re right.”

Keaton knows how much Annie Hall, which Allen based on aspects of her life and their relationship, has defined her. Allen, as director and boyfriend, was “like an idiot, but he was fun. And then when he started writing these insanely brilliant female characters, that’s when I started to really understand his gift.” In her entertaining (if typically meandering) memoir Then Again, she says she still loves Allen and they are still close. She has defended him against accusations by his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow that he molested her. (“I believe my friend,” Keaton told The Guardian in 2014.)

Is she in therapy, I ask, sounding only a little like Alvy. Keaton’s answer is a bit Alvy too. “Really … the answer to that is always going to be yes, but maybe not as it was at one point, when I was ‘in analysis’ on a daily basis, but now not so much.” Did playing Sister Mary in Paolo Sorrentino’s The Young Pope open her eyes to any revelations? Only how nice it was to chillax in Italy filming the hit series that starred Jude Law as a supremely hot pontiff. “I learned a lot about how beautiful Rome is, how beautiful those buildings are.”

Keaton will not reprise the part in Sorrentino’s follow-up series, The New Pope. A project she does have in the pipeline, however, is Book Club, a comedy about four friends whose lives are changed by reading Fifty Shades of Grey together.

Apart from Allen, Keaton had well-documented romances with Warren Beatty (during the filming of Reds and after) and Al Pacino. “How did it happen?” She mulls it over. “You would be working. It would usually be through some sort of work situation.” She did most of the spade work, she says. “They were hardly conquests. I tried my best to make them see me, so at least they’d think, ‘Maybe I’ll take her out.’ I worked it. I made more of the effort.”

Single she may be, but doesn’t she count her career, her children and her part-time job as a property developer (she says she has made more money from this than from her films) as a success? She’s doubtful. “I don’t think that’s really on the cards for me. I’m going to count that one out.”

Surely, at least, she’s happy? “I don’t really know what that means. Life is exciting, totally fascinating, it’s magical, but I don’t really see happy as part of the deal. It’s right up there with God. ‘Happy’ and ‘God’ and things that are so beyond our ability to even comprehend.” Or, as Annie Hall might put it, la-dee-da.

The Times

Hampstead opens tomorrow.