The Most Controversial Actress of the Oscars Season

The most controversial actress of the Oscars season.

- Jada Yuan

No one would have faulted Charlotte Rampling for not showing up today. It is midmorning on December 1, and the art-house legend, who has just turned 70, has flown to New York from Paris, where her adopted hometown was still reeling from a horrific terrorist attack, and where just two months earlier her partner of 18 years, French media tycoon Jean-Noël Tassez, had died. She is stationed at a banquette in the Soho Grand Hotel,receiving a parade of reporters, who’ve come to talk to her about her long career and her performance in Andrew Haigh’s 45 Years as a woman who discovers on her 45th wedding anniversary that she perhaps doesn’t know her husband at all. “Of course I was affected,” says British-born Rampling of the Paris attacks. “Who wouldn’t be? What affected me more was the death of my husband before. So there have been a lot of deaths just around in the last month.” She stares at the table and plays with some small jars of marmalade.

I was supposed to write this article on Rampling over a month ago, but for various reasons, I delayed. The immediate excuse was that I had other pressing deadlines, while the deeper, subconscious one was that our interview had not gone well— at least to my mind. I’d struggled to make eye contact with her, and two-thirds of the way through our time, she abruptly told me, “We’re going to have to stop, okay? I’ve had it.” I began to say I was sorry. “And please don’t say that,” she cut in. “You sound weak.” She then told the movie’s publicists, as I stood nearby, not to schedule her again for any interview that long.