Charlotte Rampling: the beauty of wrinkle on age, depression, Paris & books

Reading
“I never read books in my teens, but in my twenties I developed a burning passion for the classics. I was amazed by Dickens and Balzac”.

“I don't read biographies very much, perhaps I should. I don't like biographies. It's really rather funny, that, isn't it? Why don't I like to know about people's lives?”

Depression
“I think it happens in everyone's lives. We're all going to be depressed at one time or another, and some longer than others.”

"...that will happen to everybody. They will lose people. They will be abandoned. You have to leave your parents, you have to leave sometimes your lover. There's always the sense of having to abandon things and being abandoned. It's a universal theme that we can't avoid. It's unbelievably difficult to come to terms with, but it's not necessarily depressing. It's very much a part of life. It's very vital."

“Forsake, divorce and death are the hardest events human beings can live. I have always suffered enormously with separations. But if we can’t accept to live with our dead and our sorrow, we can run the risk of easily becoming mad. Life sometimes is not enough to help us. I agree very much with the idea of talking to a third person, ready to travel with you through your life. With depression we resemble the dead. It takes away every craving.”

“I'm not worried, it's true. I was, highly, but now I'm not. It changes as you go along. And the main reason it changes is you decide not to be affected by it. Because you're the only person who has to hang in there with it: if you hate your husband, you have to live with that hate - he's not living with it, he's gone, and you have to live with the hate and the revenge. Unless you go and kill him, and then you're going to be in prison, so what are you actually going to do about it? If you see me calm now it's because you have to turn it right round. Because nobody gives a stuff what you're feeling like, really - nobody, probably in the whole world. That's what I've thought when I've felt really upset about things that have happened to me. It just eats away at you. Suffering is only subjective.”

“Action and energy are the first forms of self defense.”

Age
“I show myself just like I am. However I'd do something if I had a double chin...I don't eat much and I have practiced yoga for 30 years. In fact, I am more afraid of what could happen in my inner-self, rather than what goes in my exterior.”

"I don't do anything sportive," she says. "I've got a very well-toned body from my athletic father, who is now 93 and still going strong. The reason for my good muscles is that he was a great athlete."

“I am part of the first generation of women who, at 50 years of age can be seductive. Another kind of seductiveness, much deeper, more mature. It is the seduction of a woman in full possession of her feminine powers, with its immense experience. Why camouflage it?”

“I do think older men are sexy, and for women that's not always quite so. There's a natural cycle that, when you're in your 50s, it's not all about that anymore. You don't necessarily have to seduce people anymore, whereas men still like doing that. I like it here in Europe, where the older woman is the venerated one: not necessarily looked up to as a sex symbol, but she's a wise woman, someone who is very beautiful but not just there to be jumped on.”

“When I was approaching 40, I did not know if I could make films again. The main thing was to stay alive. Then, several years later, I felt ready. A real substance began to take place inside me, it was still fragile but it was living and in good health. I was once again ready to show myself, to receive and to give. And in great form physically. After one reaches 40, one deserves everything one has. We merit the face and the body that we have.”

Paris and the French
"Paris is a city that likes me and I like it. I feel creative here, inspired.”

"There is something about it that smells right, and feels right," she says of her adopted city. "Some French people I love, others I don't. I quite enjoy feeling like an outsider. When you don't live in your own country, you are considered slightly different. I appreciate that. It suits me."

“The French have always been really interested in sex, they've always been very open about it - married men have had mistresses, it was the traditional thing; and women have always been included in society. French women have been made beautiful by the French people - they're very aware of their bodies, the way they move and speak, they're very confident of their sexuality. French society's made them like that. So films will project that.”
From interviews

Шарлотта Рэмплинг / Charlotte Rampling - about cinema

Cinema (& not only)
"My sister's death (1966) really pulled me up. How can you go on being frivolous after a death in your family? That's why, probably from that moment on, I went deep down, searching for the whys and wherefores of life, rather than wanting to be in films for entertainment, or just having fun, or just looking pretty and being a dolly bird."

'So, things suddenly weren't swinging any more, quite like they were. I think that's when I tried to understand what the hell was going on, and took parts like Night Porter, and other parts that sort of delved into the human psyche - they weren't just entertainment films. I didn't want to entertain any more. I became very aware of the other side of life, not just having fun.'

I ran away from all the schools I was sent to. When my family started to fall apart at an early age, I just went off. So the roles very much from then on reflected that. I was pretty rebellious anyway as a kid. I wouldn't do anything anybody wanted me to, ever."

“I can't express something on film if I don't feel it inside me. My cinematic roles have always been very closely tied to what was going on in my life.”

“I never do anything unless I want to. I have been penniless sometimes and turned down lots of things, commercial crap. But of all the films I have done, there isn't one I am ashamed of.”

“Some proposals have been offered to me, certainly not numerous, which I have refused. After some years I was in an enormous retirement. Cinema should be a shared desire.”
“Movies are a part of my life rather than a part of my career. I do choices depending on what I can accomplish at a certain moment”.

“I want to be reborn to cinema. It's amazing when I see how many times we come back to life in one lifetime!”

"It (a role) has got to fascinate me, to smell right. I'm going to be with this person for quite a while ... she's sort of a sister, or shadow self."

“I don't like rehearsals. That's probably why I don't do theatre. I don't like repeating things.”

"I'll discover what I want to do as people offer me things. I'm not about to find projects myself. That's not the way I like to work."

“...fan clubs and that sort of thing. I think it's fine. If they want to get together and talk about my screen persona, they're imagining this whole other character that's probably much more interesting than plain old me.”

“They [British media] like me to keep the vamp image. They don't like it when I make other films.”

"Vampish roles are always ones which appealed to me most. I have enjoyed characters on the darker, more wicked side of experience. Those roles have given me the chance to explore through acting what I would never have had the guts to explore in real life."

“Working on a small budget film is much more intimate than being on a Hollywood blockbuster.”

Hollywood
“It just didn't suit me. I'm not a very ambitious person and Hollywood is about ambition and career moves and getting your name around. So if you're not prepared to play that game, there's not much point in staying. There were all these American actresses my age doing it, so I would have had to fight doubly hard, and I just didn't want to do it.”

"The way they work in America is really efficient and well run, but they just don't go deep enough for me into their subjects. They like to appeal to larger audiences, so they don't get down into the character's inside, where I want to go."

"The Hollywood stuff does not interest me. I have no desire to live there and their way is not really my way of making films.”

from interviews

Charlotte Rampling: the beauty of wrinkle & a woman in harmony with herself

About herself
“Provocative subjects provoke me, and I need that. Otherwise, I'll get bored”.

“I live like those who don't work. My luxury consists in doing nothing.”

“I am very changing and....loyal. I am not a woman of betrayal.”

“I know I intimidate quite a lot of people because I get quite fierce and I look impenetrable, which is obviously not the case. It's a form of protection.”

"Our parents hadn't lived those kind of lives at all. I was from a middle-class family, but suddenly class wasn't important any more and we could explore creative fields that we'd never been able to before. It was a very intense few years for people living in London at that time. And I was very much a part of it."

“I have a playful, childlike side that only my close friends and family sees.”

“In my early 20s, I travelled a lot and went very deeply into Buddhism and yoga. We are not just material beings, there is that other side which I hope people at the end of the 20th century will realise is the only thing that is going to save us.”

“I have never gone against my nature, opposite to what I am. I cannot lie”.

“I was steeped in French culture from 9 to 12. I went to a Catholic school with my sister without speaking a word of French and felt very isolated. I was completely silent for about six months. It was actually quite traumatic, but I got another culture for which I am very grateful. I now think and dream in French. But I like reading in English best, it touches me more.”

"Actually I'm very shy. While I'm working I'm very open, that's what I do. But you don't know what it takes out of me to do it, do you?"

“I'm not very good at talking and being with people, and being gregarious and outgoing. I love people, but I have great difficulty doing it. I think the reason I have secrets is because there are a lot of things I haven't been able to let out and I'm able to let them out through the screen and this medium.”

That [Afghanistan in the mid-1960s] was about being with moving people. I lived with the Gypsies for quite a long time. And I didn’t speak their language. So that was about communicating without necessarily understanding in words. It was learning to live with silence. Which I had learned to live with as a child. So it was not that unfamiliar and it was quite comfortable to me. It was before all the atrocities happened in that country. The country was wild, and beautiful, and open as it had been for hundreds of years.

[Scotland for two months in the mid-1960s] I learned how to meditate. I learned how to be still. I learned how to spend quite a few hours not talking and just being silent. That was enormous, to learn that.

“It sounds clichéd to talk about the importance of holding on to your beliefs and intensity. But the clichés are true. I've never sold out, ever.”
From interviews