Charlotte Rampling: ‘I am prickly. People who are
prickly can’t be hurt any more’
She’s best known for her dark, difficult roles, and
doesn’t suffer fools gladly. The actor talks about swinging in the 60s, family
tragedy – and why she’s still got It
by Simon
Hattenstone
Sat 27 Mar
2021 08.00 GMT
‘That
photoshoot was such fun,” Charlotte Rampling says. “I was pinging.”
“You were
pinging?”
“Yes, I
really was pinging,” she says, with that imperious cut-glass accent. “Pinging
is when you’re at the right place at the right time, and you know you can just
make magic happen everywhere.” We don’t ping often in life, she says, but when
we do, it’s wonderful.
It’s a
cold, sunny day in Paris when we Zoom. Rampling is in her apartment in
Saint-Germain-des-Prés, “which is just like the old Chelsea that I loved”. She
is wearing shades, but takes them off to reveal those famous hooded blue-green
eyes.
Does she
feel more French than English these days? “I was thinking about this last week.
I don’t feel I belong to one specific place. It doesn’t fit with who I am. I
like to think I can spread further somehow. It’s a good feeling, actually.
Quite often I have felt uncomfortable about it.” Why? “Because I thought it was
one of the sources of feeling very alone. But I don’t think it is now.”
She says it
is empowering when you accept that there is always a positive side to a
negative, and vice versa. “When you think you’re riding on a good wave, you’re
pretty sure the next one is going to be shite. We function through contrast.”
What would life be like without the shite? “Really dull.”
The
75-year-old actor takes me back to the first time she knowingly pinged. She was
14, shy and withdrawn. The family was living in Harrow, Greater London, having
recently returned from Fontainebleau where her army officer father had been
stationed. She and her sister Sarah performed before an audience for the first
time at the annual cabaret in suburban Stanmore. Anybody who was anybody turned
up to The Smoking Concert and did a little turn. To her astonishment, she loved
it. “I felt so great on stage. We wore fishnet tights, macs and berets, and
sang a series of sweet French songs. I knew I was good, because I was
absolutely in tune with myself at that moment.”
It was such
a contrast to how she felt in real life. “I was deeply awkward inside myself.
Things were incredibly difficult, but there, I felt just great.” She didn’t go
on to study drama, or perform in school plays. She simply waited another year
for an opportunity to ping in front of the good people of Stanmore.
Rampling’s background
is unusual: her mother, Anne, was a painter and heiress to the Gurteen clothing
company. “My mum had a lovely life. She was very cherished and loved by her
family.” Meanwhile her father, Godfrey, himself the son of an officer, won a
gold medal with the British 4x400m relay team at Hitler’s infamous 1936 Berlin
Olympics, and later became a lieutenant colonel in the Royal Artillery.
“I was
always a bit in love with my dad. He was tough and very good-looking, and I was
rather besotted.” He was also extremely unhappy for much of his life. “Mum was
the happy one. He was a troubled man, a haunted man. A lot of men were, of that
generation, coming through war.” He never mentioned the gold medal, and she
only discovered he had won it when she came across newspaper cuttings her
mother had kept. When she asked to see it, he told her he had lost it on his
travels. Was he proud of his achievements? “No, he wasn’t. That was his
tragedy. But he lived till he was 100 and he was much better when he was very
old.”
I tell her
that I read he had described the young Charlotte as “prickly”. She hoots. “You
picked up on that word! That makes me laugh.” Why? “Because I so picked up on
that word, too. It’s a key word for me. Because I am prickly. Dad so got it.”
What did he mean? “Well, what do you think? If you say prickly, what do you
think of?” Not somebody you would want to cuddle? “Exactly. Somebody who kept
you away – keeps you away. You can approach, but you really need to know how.”
Somebody who could hurt you? “Yes, of course. You have to be very wary with
them. People who are prickly can’t be hurt any more. They’ve had it. So we just
have to be prickly to make sure nobody’s going to come in and grab us.” Has she
been hurt badly? “Hmmm! I can’t tell you all that. What kind of conversation is
this?” She laughs, but this time it sounds like a warning. “I give you a few
clues and then you go wanting more!”
Hollywood wasn’t my cup of tea. I wanted to go
into the auteur world of semi-darkness
Rampling
went to prestigious private girls’ schools in France and in England, and at the
age of 16 left for a secretarial college in London. At 17, she was spotted by a
casting agent, and made her proper film debut (she was uncredited for a
nightclub scene in A Hard Day’s Night) in the Boulting brothers’ comedy Rotten
To The Core in 1965. A year later she struck gold with the 60s classic Georgy
Girl, an upbeat comedy with a dark underbelly in which she played posh
mean-girl Meredith. I remind Rampling of the trailer, which describes her as a
“sexy little dish” and “a doll never out of trouble”.
It’s funny
how people conflated you with your character, I say. “They did from the
beginning because that’s what I was doing, really. I never considered myself as
an actress in the grand sense of so many women of my generation, who had been
to all the schools and done all the Shakespeare. I felt like a renegade, coming
in and grabbing my place, which I hadn’t really deserved. So I said to myself
early on: I play roles as if they were me.”
What about
that description of her in the trailer? “No! I didn’t feel like a sexy little
dish. But what I felt was power inside me, and sexuality is a power. I knew
that I had sex appeal. You could feel you had this attraction. I didn’t have to
wait for the boys to come – I had it, I didn’t have to flaunt it. And to put
that energy into performing is very powerful. And it’s very sexy, too, because
you know you can use it as far as you want, because nobody’s going to hurt
you.” She is on a roll. “It’s not for real. You don’t actually have to have a
real relationship. You can have all the fantasy of what another story, other
than your life, could be, and that makes film-making really exciting.”
The 60s
were swinging, and Rampling swung with the best of them. “Everything was
happening all at once. There was a sense of freedom and hope and fun and
laughter – everything could be possible.” Was she old enough to know that
things had been different? “I was brought up in the 50s and they were pretty
difficult. So when the 60s came, we were young and in London, and had a lot of
money because the economy was good. And we had wild ideas about what we could
do.”
Rampling
comes to a sudden, crushing halt. “It stopped abruptly with my sister’s death,”
she says. Sarah, who was three years older, had been living in Argentina with
her husband when she took her own life, aged 23, in 1967, two months after
giving birth prematurely to her son. “I couldn’t be what I had been before. I
couldn’t be happy any more. Your whole life changes.” Had she realised Sarah
suffered poor mental heath? “No. I knew she was fragile, but I didn’t know what
mental health problems were.” She says Sarah had a profound ability to love and
be loved; it was Sarah who had first recognised Charlotte’s talent when they
performed together in Stanmore, telling her friends: “Charlotte is going to be
known worldwide.”
At first
Rampling’s father told her, and her mother, that Sarah had suffered a fatal
brain tumour. It wasn’t until three years later that he told her the truth.
That must have been a double grief? “Yep, sure was,” she says. She also had to
keep it a secret: her father made her promise that she would never tell her
mother, because he believed it would kill her. That must have been so tough, I
say. “Sure was,” she repeats. Does she think it scarred her? “No, I’m not going
to comment on that. Remember, I’m not only prickly, I’m distant. I only keep a
distance so I can get as much understanding of the situation without being on
top of it. And it works.” She refers me instead to a short memoir she wrote
four years ago called Who I Am, in which Sarah plays a prominent role.
As well as
the prickliness, you have a great ability to show tenderness in your work, I
say. “Of course, why wouldn’t I? Have I been blacklisted from tenderness?” she
fires back. Rampling’s voice is an incredible weapon – by turns curious,
seductive, bored, teacherly, withering and compassionate.
After
Sarah’s death, Rampling, barely into her 20s, was done with frivolity and
hedonism. “What I said to myself is, ‘Now I have to go underground. If I’m
going to be in the film industry, it’s not about making 60s-type fun films,
it’s about going inside.’”
Was that
for Sarah or for herself? “It was because it wasn’t decent to go out and just celebrate
futile things and have fun.”
Did she
discuss this with other people or just internally? “I discussed it internally,
but boy, do you need help afterwards.” Where did she get that help? “You get
professional help from psychiatrists and psychotherapists, reading a lot of
philosophy and literature.” She says the book The Road Less Travelled by M
Scott Peck helped greatly.
In her
work, she went deeper, exposing herself in every way possible. Unlike so many
Hollywood roles, the sexuality at the core of hers wasn’t cute or passive or
submissive. It was challenging, confrontational, defiant; she stared into the
camera with those remarkable eyes, almost daring us to return her gaze. The
parts became increasingly transgressive: in The Night Porter, Rampling has a
sadomasochistic relationship with her Nazi torturer; in ’Tis Pity She’s A Whore
she has an incestuous affair with her brother; and in Max Mon Amour, she cheats
on her diplomat husband with a chimpanzee. “Ah, the ape – I love it,” she says
affectionately.
She rarely
worked in America, and when she did it was with major league directors – Sidney
Lumet in The Verdict, Woody Allen in Stardust Memories. Rampling says she
simply wasn’t interested in Hollywood. “Let’s use a nice old English
expression: it just wasn’t my cup of tea. I wanted to go into the auteur and
European world of the semi-darkness.”
Her private
life attracted as many headlines as her films. In the 60s she lived with her
agent and partner, Bryan Southcombe, and their friend, the model Randall
Laurence; there were rumours of a menage a trois, but she always denied it. She
married Southcombe and they had a son, Barnaby – now a film-maker, who directed
Rampling in the movie I, Anna in 2012.
In 1976,
she met the composer Jean-Michel Jarre at a dinner party in Saint-Tropez;
within days she had left Southcombe for him (Jarre left his wife, too). In
1978, they married and had a son, David; Rampling also brought up his daughter,
Émilie. In 1995, their marriage broke down after she discovered his infidelity
via the newspapers. In the late 90s, she began a long, happy relationship with
journalist and businessman Jean-Noël Tassez, which lasted until his death in
2015, aged 59.
Today
Rampling lives with two cats – a huge Maine Coon called Joe and an alley cat
called Felix. Has there been anyone since Jean-Noël died? “I have a friend who
I see, yes. In France you can call it amitié amoureuse. The French do have ways
of talking about love that the rest of the world don’t. Amitié is friendship,
amoureuse is to love, so it’s an in-love friendship.”
Soon after
her separation from Jarre, she fell into a deep, prolonged depression and
didn’t work for two years. I ask if she feared she would never make a comeback.
She says that was an irrelevance at the time. “Come back or not come back, it
didn’t really matter. I just needed to come back to being alive. To make films
or to be a cook in a bakery; it didn’t really matter as long as I was still
alive.”
Sure enough
she did return – and has been hugely successful ever since: in French dramas
(François Ozon’s Under The Sand and Swimming Pool), TV crime series
(Broadchurch, Dexter), even feelgood movies (StreetDance). And, of course,
there has been plenty of transgression along the way: the matron of a “whore
school” in Red Sparrow; the lonely pickup artist in I, Anna; and the Reverend
Mother in the forthcoming remake of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi classic Dune, in
which she stars opposite Timothée Chalamet. She has now made well over 100
films, roughly half of them this century. Perhaps her most memorable recent
performances have been in two quietly eviscerating films: 45 Years and Hannah.
In both, she plays a woman haunted by her husband’s secret life.
Did her depression
change her as an actor? “Yes, I think you’re much more conscious of being.
You’re just more aware, the sensorial part of yourself goes through a huge
change.” She comes to another sudden stop. “I can’t explain all this. I really
can’t. I’m afraid I can’t even think about it any more because I don’t want to
go there again.”
In 2016,
aged 69, she won her first Oscar nomination, for 45 Years. It should have been
a career highlight, but everything went horribly wrong. The previous year had
seen the start of the #OscarsSoWhite protest movement, after all 20 acting
nominations went to white actors (David Oyelowo had been regarded as a shoo-in
for his brilliant portrayal of Martin Luther King in Selma). The same thing
happened in 2016, and Rampling was asked on French radio about the campaign to
boycott the awards. She replied, “It is racist to whites.” By the evening, she
had issued a clarifying statement, saying: “I regret that my comments could
have been misinterpreted. I simply meant to say that in an ideal world, every
performance will be given equal opportunities for consideration. Diversity in
our industry is an important issue that needs to be addressed.” But the damage
had been done.
I’m using every piece of me. I always have. Even
if I sometimes don’t want to be in the movies any more
Today, she
says her head was all over the place. “I’d lost my partner Jean-Noël two months
before. I’d lived with him for 20 years and he died of a ghastly cancer. It was
early morning and it was a boom-boom-boom news programme and it went straight
out.” But she knows she has no excuses. “I just blew it. I knew I’d blown it
straight away.” She wasn’t aware of the full repercussions until the evening.
“My ex-husband Jean-Michel called me and said, ‘What happened?’ And I said, ‘I
don’t want to hear or read anything that people are saying, I know what I’ve
said, and of course I will excuse myself. But that’s all I’ll do, because it
was so violent how the haters reacted.’” Does she think her comments cost her
the Oscar? “Yeah, probably,” she says giddily. “But that’s life, isn’t it?”
I suggest
she’s making her best work now. But she’s not having any of it. “No, I don’t
compartmentalise,” she says tersely. “Questions from a journalist are always so
simplified. I don’t spend time thinking about that kind of thing. All I can say
is, I’m using every piece of me, and I have always used every piece of me in
any way I can. Even if I don’t want to, because sometimes I really don’t want
to be in the movies any more.” Why not? “Because it’s a huge effort, more and
more so now that I’m older. Physical, mental, the moving around, the locations,
the hours, it takes a lot out of me.” Has she felt that for ages? “No, only
since I hit 70. My 60s were great. I felt very strong. But in your 70s you need
to go a little slower. I love the age I am now, but for work when you’ve got to
be pinging a lot of the time, it is hard.”
We lose
each other briefly on Zoom, then the picture returns. “Sorry, I nodded off,”
she says sardonically. I apologise for boring her. “No, no, no, but we should
hurry up a bit.” Rampling is keen to wrap up. She warns me to take care with
the words when I write. “Don’t jumble them around too much. OK, my dear, over
to you now.”
The
following day I see the photoshoot, and understand just what Rampling means by
pinging. I call to tell her how much they made me smile. She says she had such
a fabulous time with the stylist, Jenke Ahmed Tailly, mixing and matching the
outfits. I mention the outrageous white quilted short shorts. She bursts out
laughing. “I didn’t think I could get into that outfit, till I started to
ping.” Then there’s the photo of her in shades, jeans and headscarf. “We
thought, oh my God! This is major, this look.” And you look so fantastically
miserable, I say. “Right!” she says with delight. “Right!”
Old prickly me is finding better things in
herself. Love yourself more and you can love others more
Is there a
secret to being stylish? “You either have it or you don’t, I’m sorry to say.
Everybody can look good and get clothes that are working. But it’s like the old
‘It factor’, when the moguls were choosing women to be stars and had them all
lined up in their little bikinis, all dressed the same, and there’d just be one
that had it. I don’t know what it is. Sometimes I’ve still got it.”
There is
one thing I’m still curious about – was the rumour about a menage a trois with
Bryan Southcombe and Randall Laurence in the 60s really a misunderstanding?
“Well, I did have two boyfriends, which was racy at the time,” she says now.
Why has she denied it in the past? “You still had parents who were quite
conventional and you needed to protect them, and I didn’t want all the people
in the golf club thinking…” She giggles. “You have to keep up appearances,
don’t you?” How did she choose in the end – could she just as easily have
married Randall? “Who knows what life has to offer you? But sometimes choices
have to be made and I chose Bryan because I got pregnant. And you will say, how
did you know it was his? I won’t go any further. But I chose Bryan, and Bryan
is Barnaby’s father.”
‘I did have
two boyfriends, which was racy at the time’: with soon-to-be-husband Bryan
Southcombe (on right) and Randall Laurence, 1971. Photograph: Sorci/Camera
Press
She pauses.
“We were all very young. It was all chop and change. Quite a lot of things were
experimental, I suppose. How to live a life! I don’t know whether I’ve got it
now, but never mind – I had it!” Randall went his own way after she married
Southcombe, and they lost touch. Southcombe died in 2007.
I’m
thinking about the hurt she said she experienced as a child, and how she felt
she no longer had the right to be happy after Sarah died. Yesterday she had
said that work gets harder the older she gets; but does life get better in
other ways? “Yeah, it does, actually.” How? “You can see I’ve done quite a lot
of work to get somewhere in a more or less OK state. There’s more meaning to
things, there’s something more loving. Perhaps old prickly me is finally
finding a few better things in herself. And once you love yourself a bit more,
you can love others more. So it all works together.”
And with
that she signs off. “I did this because I’ve always loved the Guardian. So
there we are. Bye bye. God bless.”
Charlotte
Rampling
Tessa
Charlotte Rampling OBE (born 5 February 1946) is an English actress, model, and
singer, known for her work in European arthouse films in English, French, and
Italian. An icon of the Swinging Sixties, she began her career as a model and
later became a fashion icon and muse.
She was
cast in the role of Meredith in the 1966 film Georgy Girl, which starred Lynn
Redgrave. She soon began making French and Italian arthouse films, notably
Luchino Visconti's The Damned (1969) and Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter
(1974). She went on to star in Zardoz (1974), Farewell, My Lovely (1975), Woody
Allen's Stardust Memories (1980), opposite Paul Newman in The Verdict (1982),
Long Live Life (1984), Max, Mon Amour (1986), Angel Heart (1987), and The Wings
of the Dove (1997). In 2002 she released an album of recordings in the style of
cabaret, titled As A Woman.
In the
2000s, she became the muse of French director François Ozon, appearing in his
films Under the Sand (2000), Swimming Pool (2003), and Angel (2007). On
television, she is known for her role as Evelyn Vogel in Dexter (2013). In 2012
she was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award,
both for her performance in the miniseries Restless. Other television roles
include work in Broadchurch and London Spy, for the latter of which she was
nominated for a Golden Globe Award. For her performance in the 2015 film 45
Years, she won the Berlin Film Festival Award for Best Actress, the European
Film Award for Best Actress, and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best
Actress. In 2017, she won the Volpi Cup for Best Actress at the 74th Venice
International Film Festival for Hannah.
A four-time
César Award nominee, she received an Honorary César in 2001 and France's Legion
of Honour in 2002. She was made an OBE in 2000 for her services to the arts,
and received the 2015 Lifetime Achievement Award from the European Film Awards.
In 2015, she released her autobiography, which she wrote in French, titled Qui
Je Suis, or Who I Am. She later worked on an English translation, which was
published in March 2017.
Rampling
was born in 1946 in Sturmer, Essex, the daughter of Isabel Anne (née Gurteen;
1918–2001), a painter, and Godfrey Rampling (1909–2009), an Olympic gold
medallist and British Army officer. She spent most of her childhood in
Gibraltar, France and Spain, before she returned to the UK in 1964.
She
attended Académie Jeanne d'Arc in Versailles and St Hilda's School, a boarding
school in Bushey, Hertfordshire, England. She had one sister, Sarah, who died
by suicide in 1966, aged 23. She and Sarah had had a close relationship, and
they had performed in a cabaret act together during their teenage years.
Rampling
made her stage debut at the age of 14, singing French chansons with her sister
at Bernays Institute in Stanmore. She began her career as a model and first
appeared in a Cadbury advertisement. She was working as a secretary when she
was noticed by a casting agent in the same building. Her first screen
appearance, which was uncredited, was as a water skier in Richard Lester's film
The Knack ...and How to Get It. She also appeared as an extra in Lester's next
directorial outing, the Beatles film A Hard Day's Night (1964). In 1965, she
was cast in the role of Meredith in the film Georgy Girl and was given a role
by John Boulting in the comedy Rotten to the Core. In 1967, she starred
opposite Yul Brynner in the adventure film The Long Duel. She also appeared
alongside Franco Nero in the Italian film Sardinia Kidnapped (Sequestro di
persona) (1968), directed by Gianfranco Mingozzi.
On
television, Rampling played the gunfighter Hana Wilde in "The Superlative
Seven," a 1967 episode of The Avengers. In 1969, she starred opposite Sam
Waterston in the romance-drama Three, and in 1972, she starred opposite Robert
Blake in the drama Corky and portrayed Anne Boleyn in the costume drama Henry
VIII and His Six Wives. After this, her acting career blossomed in both English
and French cinema.
Despite an
early flurry of success, she told The Independent: "We weren't happy. It
was a nightmare, breaking the rules and all that. Everyone seemed to be having
fun, but they were taking so many drugs they wouldn't know it anyway."
Rampling
has performed controversial roles. In 1969, in Luchino Visconti's The Damned
(La Caduta degli dei), she played a young wife sent to a Nazi concentration
camp. Critics praised her performance, and it cast her in a whole new image:
mysterious, sensitive, and ultimately tragic. "The Look," as her
co-star Dirk Bogarde called it, became her trademark.
1970–Early
1980s: adult roles, Hollywood and Italian cinema
She
appeared nude in the cult classic Vanishing Point, in a scene deleted from the
U.S. theatrical release (included in the U.K. release). Lead actor Barry Newman
remarked that the scene was of aid in the allegorical lilt of the film.
In 1974's
The Night Porter, in which she again appears alongside Dirk Bogarde, she plays
a former concentration camp inmate who, after World War II, reunites with a
former camp guard (Bogarde) with whom she had had an ambiguous, sadomasochistic
relationship. Their relationship resumes, and she becomes his mistress and
victim once again. In Max mon amour, she played a woman who falls in love with
a chimpanzee. In 1974, she posed nude for Playboy photographs by Helmut Newton.
In 1976 she co-presented for Best Art Direction-Set Decoration Award with
Anthony Hopkins at the 48th Academy Awards.
In 1974,
Rampling starred in John Boorman's science-fiction film Zardoz opposite Sean
Connery. She also starred with Peter O'Toole in Foxtrot (1976) and with Richard
Harris in Orca (1977). She gained recognition from American audiences in a
remake of Raymond Chandler's detective story Farewell, My Lovely (1975) and
later with Woody Allen's Stardust Memories (1980), and in The Verdict (1982),
an acclaimed drama directed by Sidney Lumet that starred Paul Newman.
The middle
1980s and the 1990s
Rampling
starred in Claude Lelouch's 1984 film Viva la vie (Long Live Life), before
going on to star in the cult-film Max, Mon Amour (1986), and appear in the
thriller Angel Heart (1987). For a decade she withdrew from the public eye due
to depression. In the late 1990s, she appeared in The Wings of the Dove (1997),
played Miss Havisham in a BBC television adaptation of Great Expectations
(1998), and starred in the film adaptation of Anton Chekov’s The Cherry Orchard
(1999), directed by Michael Cacoyannis. In 1997, she was a jury member at the
54th Venice International Film Festival.
The 2000s
Rampling
credits François Ozon with drawing her back to film in the 2000s, a period when
she came to terms with the death of her elder sister Sarah who, after giving
birth prematurely in 1966, died by suicide at 23. "I thought that after
such a long time of not letting her be with me," she told The Guardian,
"I would like to bring her back into my life."The character she
played in Ozon's Swimming Pool (2003), Sarah Morton, was named in her sister's
honour.
For most of
Rampling's life, she would say only that her sister had died of a brain
haemorrhage; when she and her father learned of Sarah’s death, they agreed they
would never let her mother know the truth. They kept their secret until
Rampling's mother died in 2001.
Rampling
appeared in Tony Scott's Spy Game (2001), and she earned César Award
nominations for Under the Sand (2000), Swimming Pool (2003), and Lemming
(2005). At 59, she appeared in Laurent Cantet's Heading South (Vers le Sud), a
2005 film about sexual tourism. She appeared as Ellen, a professor of French
literature, who holidays in 1970s Haiti to get the sexual attention she does
not get at home.
On her
choice of roles, Rampling said, "I generally don't make films to entertain
people. I choose the parts that challenge me to break through my own barriers.
A need to devour, punish, humiliate or surrender seems to be a primal part of
human nature, and it's certainly a big part of sex. To discover what normal
means, you have to surf a tide of weirdness."
The actress
has continued to work in sexually provocative films, such as Basic Instinct 2
(2006). In 2008, she portrayed Countess Spencer, the mother of Keira
Knightley's title character, in The Duchess and played the High Priestess in
post-apocalyptic thriller Babylon A.D.. In 2002, she recorded an album titled
Comme Une Femme, or As A Woman. It is in both French and English, and includes
passages that are spoken word as well as selections which Rampling
sang.[citation needed]. In February 2006, Rampling was named as the jury
president at the 56th Berlin International Film Festival.
She has
been seen on the covers of Vogue, Interview and Elle magazines and
CRUSHfanzine. In 2009, she posed nude in front of the Mona Lisa for Juergen
Teller. In 2009, Rampling appeared in Todd Solondz's Life During Wartime.
2010s
In 2010,
she completed filming Cleanskin, a terrorist thriller, and played Miss Emily in
the dystopian romantic fantasy Never Let Me Go. She also appeared as Helena in
the dance drama StreetDance 3D and the nun Mary in The Mill and the Cross with
Michael York and Rutger Hauer. In 2011, she appeared in Lars Von Trier's
Melancholia. For her role in the 2012 miniseries Restless, Rampling was
nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award. In 2013,
she appeared as Dr. Evelyn Vogel in the final season of Dexter. Rampling also
appeared as Alice in the drama Jeune et Jolie and the elderly Adriana do Prado
in Night Train to Lisbon. Other television roles include the ITV drama
Broadchurch (2015) and the BBC drama London Spy (2015). In 2014, she was named
the new face of NARS Cosmetics to launch their new lipstick campaign.
In 2015,
Rampling starred opposite Tom Courtenay in Andrew Haigh's 45 Years. The film is
about a couple preparing to celebrate their 45th wedding anniversary when new
information regarding the husband's missing previous lover arises. 45 Years was
screened in the main competition section of the 65th Berlin International Film
Festival. She won the Silver Bear for Best Actress and Tom Courtenay won the
Silver Bear for Best Actor. For this role, she also won the Los Angeles Film
Critics Association Award for Best Actress, the European Film Award for Best
Actress, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress, and also
received nominations for the BIFA Award for Best Performance by an Actress in a
British Independent Film and the Critics' Choice Movie Award for Best Actress.
In 2016,
Rampling accused those boycotting that year's Academy Awards ceremony of
hostility towards Caucasians. Her comments were called "offensive,
outrageous and ignorant" by Chelsea Clinton, while they were defended by
Clint Eastwood. Rampling later apologised for her comments and expressed regret
that her statements were misinterpreted.
That same
year, Rampling backed children's fairytales app, GivingTales, in aid of UNICEF
together with Roger Moore, Stephen Fry, Ewan McGregor, Joan Collins, Joanna
Lumley, Michael Caine, David Walliams, Paul McKenna and Michael Ball.
In 2017,
Rampling co-starred as Veronica Ford with Jim Broadbent and Emily Mortimer in
The Sense of an Ending, which was based on the novel by Julian Barnes. It had
its world premiere at the Palm Springs International Film Festival in January
2017. Her next film was in Andrea Pallaoro's Hannah, where she portrayed the
title role of the wife of a man imprisoned on uncertain charges. For her role,
she was awarded the Volpi Cup for Best Actress award at the 74th Venice
International Film Festival.
In 2017,
Rampling starred opposite Alicia Vikander and Eva Green in Euphoria, directed
by Lisa Langseth. In January 2019, she was cast as Reverend Mother Gaius Helen
Mohiam in the upcoming Denis Villeneuve adaptation of Dune.
Personal
life
In 1972,
Rampling married New Zealand actor and publicist Bryan Southcombe and had a
son, Barnaby (who became a television director), before divorcing in
1976.[citation needed] The couple was reported to have been living in a ménage
à trois with a male model, Randall Laurence, and in 1974, Rampling was quoted
by the syndicated columnist Earl Wilson as saying: "There are so many
misunderstandings in life. I once caused a scandal by saying I lived with two
men [...] I didn't mean it in a sexual sense [...] We were just like any people
sharing an apartment."
In 1978,
Rampling married French composer Jean-Michel Jarre and had a second son, David
Jarre, who became a musician and singer. She raised her stepdaughter, Émilie
Jarre, who became a fashion designer. The marriage was publicly dissolved in
1997, when Rampling learned from tabloid newspaper stories about Jarre's
affairs with other women.
Rampling
was engaged to Jean-Noël Tassez, a French journalist and businessman, from 1998
until his death in 2015. Rampling lives in Paris. She has also suffered from
depression.
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