70-year-old actress and first-time Oscar nominee Charlotte Rampling: ‘Age is just a mindset’

“It was great for me – it felt like a coming-home film,” says Charlotte Rampling. “It was such a good feeling.”

She's talking about her new movie, 45 Years, and those good feelings have grown and grown.

When it debuted at the Berlin International Film Festival a year ago, 70-year-old Rampling and co-star Tom Courtenay, 78, both won prizes for their ­performances.

It has also earned her the first Oscar nomination of her distinguished career – a remarkable feat given the film is a low-budget British feature about an elderly couple in crisis. Hardly the sort of pitch that normally gets Hollywood excited.

Shot in Norfolk, on the east coast of England, Rampling says the film stirred up overriding memories of her youth, as she grew up nearby, in between spells in France and Spain.

“My Dad was in the army,” she says. “We were at Swaffham, which is just next to Norwich. And so there was a familiarity about this experience – a childhood familiarity – which is perfect for actors because we need to be in our childhood. We need to be in that state.”

Rampling plays Kate Mercer, who is about to celebrate her 45th wedding anniversary with husband Geoff (Courtenay) when a long-forgotten figure from the past suddenly sets their marriage in turmoil.

For Rampling, the film offered a chance to show viewers that serious films about characters in their twilight years deserve to be made and seen.

“I know there are not many films about these older people, but there can be,” she says.

“Actually, there are not a lot of good films about anything.”

Rampling’s recent comments on the diversity controversy raging in Hollywood – after some stars threatened to boycott the Oscars over the lack of nominations for African-American actors – proved less than popular. Speaking on a French radio show, she reputedly said this was “racist to whites” – a comment that infuriated some, despite the actress later claiming the comments were misinterpreted. In either case, her chances at the Academy Awards next week might have been damaged.

But then, Rampling has always had a love-hate relationship with Hollywood. She has appeared in acclaimed films such as The Verdict, with Paul Newman, and Angel Heart, with Mickey Rourke, but spent much of her career in France, steering clear of the American industry, until a recent guest role in the final season of TV drama Dexter and now the Oscar nod helped her reconcile her feelings.

“[When I was younger] I didn’t like Hollywood and I didn’t like what they did there,” she says. “It was stupid. It was a juvenile thing that I had. Years of that – of being bitterly unhappy and hating them all.”

Rampling does not come across as a person who has allowed age to wither her. Still working furiously, she's just completed filming The Sense of an Ending, an adaptation of a Julian Barnes novel.

“So many people just get old...they think that they’re getting old. Just because they’re in their sixties, they go: ‘We can’t do this,’” she says. “With Tom [Courtenay], we used to laugh ... he was a bit like that. I used to bully him all through the film. Whether he’s got better or not, I don’t know. And it is, [age is] a mindset. It’s really a mindset.”

• 45 Years is in cinemas now

artslife@thenational.ae