Charlotte Rampling: ‘You have to do rather nasty things to get on, don’t you?’

This story is part of the December 4 edition of Sunday Life.See all 15 stories.

Charlotte Rampling is gliding down a grand staircase, framed by the light from an arched window, as I walk up to meet her. She’s tall, elegant, dressed in soft grey linen, a gentle wave at the parting of her boyish haircut. There’s an echo of the siren in a red dress who descended a similar staircase in Farewell, My Lovely back in 1975: “Mitchum, the last of the tough guys, meets Rampling, the hottest of the new broads,” ran the trailer.

Rampling, now 76, has made more than a hundred films. We’re in a stately hotel in Edinburgh talking about her film, Juniper. She speaks quietly and holds herself with poise. All the drama in her is contained in those hooded grey-blue-green eyes, so bored and catlike when stealing Georgy Girl from Lynn Redgrave and Alan Bates in 1966; so luminous in Luchino Visconti’s The Damned three years later; and alight with dangerous fire as they gazed at Dirk Bogarde in the sadomasochistic love story The Night Porter in 1974.

She gives yet another bravura performance in Juniper as Ruth, a former war photographer raging against the dying of the light. “She’s the kind of gal I like,” Rampling says. “There’s someone like her living in me, that’s for sure.”

Ruth is a sullen alcoholic, caustic and violent. After shattering the bones in one of her legs, she is taken, unwillingly, by her son to the house he shares with her rebellious teenage grandson. Underneath her cynicism, though, is an unsated hunger for life at its most vivid. “I want one more passionate love affair,” she declares.

Rampling sees herself as an introvert, driven to perform. She can be austere and daunting; the photographer Juergen Teller, with whom she has worked for many years, said he was “terrified” when he first met her. She admits it must be true, “I think, from the number of people that have said it.”

When I ask her about ageing, she says coolly: “It doesn’t speak to me, this question. It does not speak to me. I really don’t have a relationship with it. It will be what it will be. My face is not too bad, so I don’t have to have surgery. Even if I’d wanted to, I probably never would have because I’m too frightened of it and I don’t agree with it. I’m sort of fascinated by my face getting old.

“I keep myself, resolutely, as strong and well as I can, physically.” Rampling suspects her physical robustness – and that animal grace she possesses on screen – are inherited. “I’ve got very much my father’s body, the muscular tone,” she says.

Godfrey Rampling won a gold medal in the 4 x 400-metre relay at the Berlin Olympics of 1936 and it was her father she thought of after letting slip something that caused a stir which reverberated as far as the Vatican at the turn of the 1970s.

At the time, she was sharing a house with both Bryan Southcombe (her future husband and the father of her eldest son, Barnaby) and the male model Randall Laurence. “I was very frank. We weren’t thinking, ‘Oh, if I say this …’ or ‘I shouldn’t say that …’ because now we have to think what the young people think. Because it’s not correct, it’s not this, it’s not that. But back then, when David Wigg of the Daily Express asked me, ‘Which one do you love?’ I just said, ‘I love them both. I wouldn’t be able to choose.’

“And then they decided to make it into something, I can understand why – two men with one woman. My father was not too pleased. ‘What will people think at the golf club, Charlotte?’

“He was a really good man,” she says of her father, but she was afraid of him. “He was, I found out much later, a very tortured man – it’s probably where I get my angst from,” Rampling says, making an “rrrrrgh” sound to describe how it feels before settling on that word, angst. “My son, I realise, also has it.”

She’s talking not of Barnaby (who directed his mother in his 2012 thriller, I, Anna), but the magician David Jarre, her son from her second marriage, to French musician Jean-Michel Jarre (the couple also brought up Emilie, from Jarre’s first marriage). Rampling and Jarre met at a dinner party in St Tropez in 1976 and separated 20 years later over his infidelity.

It was David who sent her a message from Argentina to say he was by his aunt’s grave in Buenos Aires, with his cousin, the only son of her elder sister Sarah. That set something in motion.

In Who I Am, Rampling’s poetic 2017 memoir, she writes from the heart: “I’m coming, Sarah. I want to tell our story. I want to be with you.”

She describes the teenage Sarah – with whom she made her stage debut at 14, in a parish hall, singing French songs in fishnets and raincoats, before they sneaked off after school to audition for a club in Piccadilly. At 21, Sarah went to New York, then to Acapulco, where she met a rich cattle rancher and, within a week, “without saying anything to anyone” had married him.

“You’ve got to sort of understand how to navigate places like Hollywood. It’s fake, and it was the fake in it that seemed to be intolerable when you’re going through the particular trauma that I was going through.”Credit: Jean-Francois Robert /modds/Headpress

Three years later, in 1967, the phone rang at home. Sarah had died by suicide. Her death was a crushing, life-changing blow for Rampling, although her father did not reveal the cause of her death until years later.

When I ask if she was very wild in the 1960s, she says, “Well, I was until Sarah went. Then I just went inside.” Does the passage of time make it any easier to understand her suicide? “I don’t think so. Because I wouldn’t ever do it. I could never do what my sister did. I couldn’t do that to my parents.”

Rampling, who had been a model before she became an actor, was different after it. “It changed my perception of what I could do – and how I could carry on making films – after she’d done what she’d done and the whole family had just collapsed.”

Rampling left Britain, briefly, to make three films in Hollywood in the early 1970s – “but after the third one I was exhausted. I was miserable. I thought, ‘I’ve gotta get out of here.’

“You’ve got to sort of understand how to navigate places like Hollywood,” she adds. “It’s fake, and it was the fake in it that seemed to be intolerable when you’re going through the particular trauma that I was going through.”

Does she think she came to fame at a time when it was harder to find good roles for women? “I think there have always been good roles,” she says. And what of how women were treated in the industry? “Because I’m an actor, you’re asking me this?” she says, levelling those eyes on me.

Rampling has consistently declined to discuss the decades of unsavoury behaviour in the film business brought to light by the #MeToo movement. “It’s sort of the name of the game, that’s why,” she clarifies. “Not that I’m saying I’m in any way favouring it – obviously, [it’s] despicable. But, if you want the role, well, you’re going to do things to get it, aren’t you? And if you do that, then you have to take the consequences.

“If it’s then you’re just taken and hit, or raped, or whatever, no, no, no. But if it’s because you agree that that’s the way it has to be, though it’s unfortunate …” She pauses. “But it’s like that in a lot of jobs; you have to do rather nasty things to get on, don’t you?”

She returned to Britain but didn’t feel at home here, either, and moved to France. European film directors welcomed her subtlety: she is feted on the Continent, especially in her adopted home, where she was awarded the Légion d’Honneur in 2002. “I love my country,” she says of Britain, “but there’s something about it that I have to leave to be able to actually breathe and live – as long as I can come back.”

It is on the planet Arrakis where we may see Rampling next – she’s returning next year in part two of Dune, having nearly been part of one of the great never-happened films of the 1970s – an adaptation of Dune by cult director Alejandro Jodorowsky, which he planned as a film “that gives LSD hallucinations, without taking LSD”.

“He wanted me to be Jessica [mother of Paul Atreides, the novel’s hero]. And because he’s so visionary, so surrealist, Hollywood was just getting more and more frightened. I saw him the other day … he’s 93 now. And he’s doing, maybe, his last film, which he wants me to be in. And I said, ‘Well, this time I will. This time we’ll make it.’ ”

DT Review/The Telegraph, London.

Juniper is available to stream on Apple TV and Prime Video.

Lifeline: 13 11 14.

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