The Plath set begins with "Lady Lazarus", Plath's ferocious poem about suicide: "Dying/ Is an art, like everything else./ I do it exceptionally well." Rampling finds the enactment exhilarating but also exhausting and she likes the unmediated exposure to a live audience. A critic who witnessed their sound and fury at the Sam Wanamaker Theatre last year sensed that "these two slight, vulnerable-looking women, seen in the quivering candlelight, were involved in a confessional act."
Rampling finds Plath's piece "moving and astonishing". No one else at the time would have dared to talk of maternity in that way. "She is a loud, loud, lucid, powerful, lonely soul. She brought a lot of women along in her power."
Though she does not make the connection explicit, Rampling knows only too well the psychological complexities of womanhood and the long reach of loss. Her elder sister Sarah killed herself at the age of 23 after giving birth prematurely, but the manner of her death was kept a secret to protect their mother. The double burden of secrecy and loss was almost too much to bear. "There is a correspondence", she says, economically.
Rampling was 20 at the time, a partying Sixties It-girl, already attracting attention for her breakthrough film Georgy Girl. That youthful insouciance came to a shuddering halt. "My vision of me doing fun things and laughing and throwing a hat over a windmill and discotheques was finished," she has said. She felt she had to try to do work of substance and value as a way of serving her dead sister, describing it as simply the only way to survive herself.
But where does she really belong?
"I don't know. And it doesn't matter now. I don't feel the same connection to France as to England, but I am probably somewhere in between, mid-Channel. With culture, you can slip and slop and it's delightful. I can speak Italian well and Spanish well. It comes from having learnt to speak French early."
(She and her sister went to school in France when their father, an army officer, was on a Nato posting.) Notwithstanding national rivalries and stereotypes, she believes the French "do deeply respect and love the English. Especially women".
After the great films of her youth – Visconti's The Damned, The Night Porter, Max Mon Amour – Rampling seemed to dematerialise. There were two marriages, two children, good times, bad times, but she says she always knew she would come back; that there was more for her to do.
She credits the French director François Ozon with having rehabilitated her professionally after her traversée du desert – the arid time of dislocation and depression. His film Under the Sand (in which she appeared naked, at the age of 53) was cathartic for her. She re-realised her potential as a cinema actor, without submitting to cosmetic surgery.
The drawing power of Rampling at 69 is extraordinary. Fashion icon, muse, photographers' wild dream. François Nars made her the face of his cosmetics brand this year, and no wonder. She still has The Look, green eyes staring steadily from under a raptor's flat lids, a lithe, androgynous body and an appetite for daring and experiment. Even she recognises "the animal thing" that emanates from her on screen and she knows how to turn it on.
Ever since her great return 16 years ago, she has thought: "This is the face I've earned. This is the face that is me now. Yeah, I've still got things to say on screen."
(από την Telegraph)
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