Charlotte Rampling on controversy, getting older — and why she can’t be doing with ‘weirdos’

Charlotte Rampling wants to go home. It’s 6pm in Paris and she has spent an enjoyable but tiring five hours posing for ES Magazine’s photographer inside a sun-dappled 11th arrondissement studio. The plan had been to nip into the nearest café for our interview, but it’s late and the lure of comfort and familiarity is strong.

‘So how about that?’ she suggests. ‘We’ll do the interview at mine?’

Suffice it to say that in a world where film stars usually arrive at photo shoots ring-fenced by at least three publicists, and would never — in a million years — dream of punching their home address into a journalist’s Google Maps, this proposal is a little out of ordinary. But then, ordinary is something Rampling has never been.

From her first major screen role as the fiercely anti-establishment Meredith in 1966’s Georgy Girl, she has always blazed her own trail, eschewing the sunny simplicity of Hollywood in favour of dark, weird, highly stylised European art films such as Visconti’s The Damned and Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter: taboo-shattering meditations on fascism and twisted sexuality. Since then she has won France’s César film award, been nominated for Oscars, accepted the French Legion of Honour and a British OBE, and at 76, shows no signs of mellowing or slowing down. Her latest project, Paul Verhoeven’s Benedetta, is right up there with her most provocative work: a tale of lesbian nuns in 17th-century Italy, built upon plague, nudity, demonic possession and one memorable scene in which Jesus Christ is stripped naked to reveal female genitalia. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel this is not.

In France, where Rampling has lived since the Seventies, she is known as La Légende, equally revered for her acting as for her place in the fashion world, where she has played muse to Yves Saint-Laurent, Helmut Newton and Juergen Teller. Put simply, Rampling is an icon of Sixties cool who has somehow managed to become even more daring, intriguing and relevant with each passing decade. So, if she says we’re going home, we’re going home.

Half an hour later, I’m chaining my bike up outside a six-storey apartment block in the bustling Saint-Germain-des-Prés district, as Rampling’s car pulls up. ‘You beat me here!’ she says in her cut-glass accent, miraculously untouched by years on the continent.

She is dressed demurely in what she will later call her ‘uniform’ (‘supple black trousers, white shirt, sweater — I wear the same thing all the time’). With sunglasses on, she could be just another ultra-chic Parisian, but when she removes her shades there’s no mistaking her. The actor Dirk Bogarde called it ‘the look’: that icily imperious stare from beneath Rampling’s famous hooded eyelids. What Bogarde failed to add is that ‘the look’ can just as easily melt into a soft, twinkling grin whenever Rampling laughs, which is often.

We take the lift three floors up, where Rampling ushers me inside her spacious apartment and goes to fix us drinks. Two cats, Joe and Felix, stalk the parquet floors in search of patches of sunlight and the bookshelves are overflowing with weighty tomes on art, philosophy and film. Nestled among them is a framed copy of the Telegraph Sunday Magazine from December 1980, with Rampling smiling, sphinx-like, on the cover.

‘Oh, you spotted that, did you?’ she says, plonking a ginger ale before me. ‘That was my first-ever magazine cover.’ She corrects herself: ‘Well, I’d done dolly bird stuff before, but that was my first serious cover.’ Dolly bird stuff? She chuckles into her glass. ‘I never was a dolly bird, but I did bits of modelling to get going, you know? That’s what we did, us girls, at that time. I don’t know what they do now.’

Born in Essex to a painter mother and army officer father, Rampling was plucked from secretarial work in her teens when an ad executive spotted ‘the look’ and cast her in a Cadbury commercial. Modelling lead to being ‘out and about’ in London and she soon popped up in a nightclub scene in The Beatles’ 1964 film, A Hard Day’s Night. Or — hang on — did she? ‘I wasn’t in that!’ she hoots. ‘People are always saying I was. I knew The Beatles, but I wasn’t in their film. I saw [A Hard Day’s Night] on my IMDb page once, and I thought: “Oh, I’m in that, am I?”’

She most definitely was in Georgy Girl, which sent her career stratospheric two years later. Her bolshie, nihilistic Meredith was a groundbreaking creation for the time: a young woman with zero interest in motherhood or relationships, who basically said, in Rampling’s words, ‘eff off to everybody’. She played the part with such gutsy intensity that people assumed it was really her. ‘It shocked people,’ she remembers. ‘Casting agents would say, “I don’t think we should take her, she’s probably a pain in the arse!”’

It has been a theme throughout Rampling’s career: this idea that because she plays dark, decadent characters she is probably dark and decadent herself. Is there any truth to it? She focuses her attention on arranging some highlighter pens on the coffee table as she considers this. ‘Through the creative process, things come out of you that you didn’t know you had,’ she says, slowly. ‘One side of me is a darker side, a hidden side. I liked that about acting — that you could express that. I wanted gravitas, right from the start.’ She pauses, eyes still fixed on the neatly arranged pens. ‘It was because of what happened to Sarah.’

In 1966, Rampling’s sister, Sarah, died from suicide aged just 23. The tragedy changed her entire outlook. ‘I was 20 when Sarah died,’ she says. ‘You suddenly can’t allow yourself to have fun and be frivolous. It’s suddenly… something else.’ Hollywood — traditionally the place every ambitious young actor heads for — held no allure for her now. ‘I felt horrible there,’ she recalls. ‘It was the Sixties, drugs, everyone seeing stars and colours, laughing together and being stupid. I couldn’t do that. You might think I was part of the “scene”, but I’m not a weirdo. I don’t like weirdos; they make me feel nervous because you don’t know where the f*** they are in their heads. So, I raced straight back to Europe where I didn’t feel so out on a limb.’