Asked & Answered Charlotte Rampling

Everett CollectionCharlotte Rampling in the 1977 film “Orca.”

There aren’t many film stars who, entering their golden years, endure as icons of sensuality. Charlotte Rampling, 65 years old and un-retouched (both on screen and in real life), is one of them. The daughter of a British colonel and NATO commander, Rampling attended tony girls’ schools in France and England. She modeled briefly, before trying films, and burst onto the scene in “Georgy Girl” (1966), in which she played a flirt who is the embodiment of Swinging London. Today, after five decades on screen (including a star turn in Visconti’s classic, “The Damned”), and modeling for everyone from Helmut Newton to Juergen Teller, Rampling’s career shows no signs of abating. In “The Mill and the Cross” (currently in theaters), the Polish director Lech Majewski’s visually ravishing examination of a Breugel painting, she takes on the Virgin Mary; in “Melancholia” (opening Friday), the bad-boy Danish director Lars von Trier’s latest, her character is based upon von Trier’s despised mother. And in the fashion world, Rampling continues to inspire: Marc Jacobs designed much of his fall 2011 collection for Louis Vuitton after her role in “The Night Porter” (1974), Liliana Calvani’s controversial, S&M-infused drama about a death-camp survivor’s affair with a Nazi officer (think: leather caps and suspenders).

Her fans may now ponder Rampling’s mystique at length with “The Look,” the German director Angela Maccarone’s documentary portrait of the star captured in conversations with friends (including the novelist Paul Auster and the photographer Peter Lindbergh) on subjects ranging from aging to self-exposure to her own radical career choices, and interspersed with clips from her films. On Nov. 4, the afternoon of the film’s opening, Rampling — chic in a black blazer by Limi Yamamoto (Yoji’s daughter) over black YSL men’s leggings and a charcoal Benetton cardigan — sat in a private lobby of the Soho Grand Hotel, musing on her half century of life as a style icon.

Q.

For someone who began working in the 1960s, the past decade has been amazingly productive for you, given your high-profile collaborations with Francois Ozon (“Swimming Pool,” “Under the Sand”) and Laurent Cantet (“Heading South”), among others.

A.

It’s true, although I don’t really see it as that. I see it as making sense of that part of my life. I’ve always needed for my work in cinema to have an intimate rapport with me as a person at each time in my life. I always thought, in a rather grand way, that I didn’t want to be an actor. I wanted to express being, in a creative sense, on the screen. For a while, in my 40s, I left cinema. I didn’t know if I wanted to carry on, I went through a big change, like a sort of snake, shedding its skin. And when I came back into it, with Ozon, who was very much a soul mate, directors began offering me the chance to express myself like that in their films.

You’ve been attracted throughout your career to controversial roles and projects, from “The Night Porter” to “Max, Mon Amour” [Nagisa Oshima’s surreal 1986 farce about a bourgeois wife’s affair with a chimpanzee], or even the recent nudes you shot with Juergen Teller. What leads you into work that pushes against the boundaries of other people’s sensibilities?

It’s because I need to. It’s my way of being able to learn, and to make sense of my world. These things aren’t rational. It’s not something I thought would be “good to do.” It’s not a strategy. It’s my personal way of evolving.

Was that true even early on, with “Georgy Girl”?

Well, probably. I was very wild inside, but I didn’t know what I was going to do with that wildness. I’d done a bit of modeling, but not much, because I went very quickly into cinema. I thought modeling was too soppy. I went back to it afterwards, when I was an actor, and enjoyed it.

I think I have some of those pictures here. [We look at pages from French and American Vogue in the 1970s, of Rampling in Yves Saint Laurent, shot by Helmut Newton and Jeanloup Sieff.]

When I met Newton, he had never done a nude. We did our first nudes together. And then there was no stopping us! Because he was my first photographer, really, the first one I bonded with, in a very special way. And [the photographers] create your image. I’ve always been fascinated by that, not the modeling side, but the creation of a fixed image of someone, and how that can enhance you as a performer in your films.

So your recent work with Juergen Teller [who photographed her nude, alongside the model Raquel Zimmermann, after hours in the Louvre] is really part of a continuum.

When I met Juergen, we just did a little something for Libération in Paris. Then he asked me to do something else in Libération, a fashion spread. And from then on, the collaboration blossomed. Because I need to have that spirit of understanding, to be able to go anywhere, where you know you’re just going to support each other, there’s not going to be any kind of betrayal.

Does it feel different to do a nude now than it did back in the day?

Well, when I did those pictures with Juergen I said to myself, That’s probably my last nude. And what a fantastic place to say goodbye to nudes — in the Louvre! We had it all to ourselves, it was all closed.

Do you ever think about the political dimension of making yourself visible, as an older woman?

Well, I think that anything that’s of any worth has a political content, doesn’t it? So am I political? Yeah, probably. If I’m a thinking person, and I live in society, I must be.