‘I’m not counting’: Charlotte Rampling on her decades-spanning career, and her Oscar-nominated role in 45 Years

Charlotte Rampling is amused whenever I mention her chilly persona – during both her 2012 Hong Kong visit and this interview on her acclaimed new film, 45 Years, which won her a Silver Bear (alongside co-star Tom Courtenay) at the 2015 Berlin International Film Festival and a best actress nomination at this year’s Oscars.

While her latest character, Kate, finds herself in a more vulnerable position than the sort of character she’s apt to play, the actress flatly rejects my contention that she’s there to suffer and persist. “She’s not there to suffer and persist,” counters Rampling, who turned 70 in February. “She’s there to try and make sense of a tsunami that’s happening inside her, which is illogical and unreasonable.”

Unlike Rampling, who often appears to be in command of every situation, her character in Andrew Haigh’s quietly heartbreaking drama is loosening her grip on a decades-long marriage with Geoff Mercer (Courtenay), after an unexpected discovery about the latter’s past. The story begins with the news that the body of Geoff’s prior girlfriend, presumed dead during a vacation in Switzerland, is found preserved in the ice.

“There’s no reason she should be jealous of this woman who’s been dead for 50 years,” says the British-born Rampling, also a long-time star of French and Italian cinema. “She’s just destabilised by Geoff’s reaction to this, and then by her own.”

To some people, 50 years may feel like infinity. To Rampling, it is roughly the time that she’s been famous: her first leading role came in the comedy Rotten to the Core (1965), when she was 19. “Has it [been 50 years]? I’m not counting,” she giggles. “Don’t bother with that. I don’t like these kind of details, because they sort of compress time. I don’t want time compressed.”

According to Rampling, the earliest role that she “really registered” was in Georgy Girl, a fashionable comedy from 1966. “There I was a bit scared,” she recalls, “because I saw things [on screen] that I didn’t know were in me – that is to say that you are sort of expressing things. I saw a whole layer of things that actually were coming out but I didn’t even know I had in me, and it scared me.”