Harry Angel, the seedy Brooklyn gumshoe played by Mickey Rourke in Alan Parker`s chilling new thriller, ”Angel Heart,” is hot on the trail of the mysterious fortune-teller, Madame Krusemark, played by Charlotte Rampling. Hired by the sinister Robert De Niro, he`s tracked her all the way from the cold of New York to the humid bayous of Louisiana. But what he finds when he bursts into her New Orleans apartment is not a pretty sight.
Rampling`s character lies mutilated on the floor, her bloody heart cut out and left sitting on the lace tablecloth beside her.
If it`s a particularly heartless finale for such a distinctive actress, it`s not one that goes without recognition. ”It was a very difficult role to cast and play,” commented Parker, ”because it had to have just the right combination of class and eccentricity, and not too many actresses can give you that. In fact, I`d auditioned a large number for the part–without much success–before managing to get hold of Rampling, whom I`d always admired but never worked with.”
The director`s choice apparently also pleased Rourke, who had originally suggested Rampling for the role.
The actress herself is equally happy with the results, despite her character`s graphic demise. ”Although I`m not on the screen that much during the film, it`s a pivotal role,” explained the reclusive Rampling, who said that, for her, the Krusemark character engendered ”a great feeling of expectation.”
”I can`t say it was an easy part,” she continued. ”It was very hot and muggy while we were filming all my scenes on location in New Orleans.”
Just as she was going into the filming of ”Angel Heart,” Rampling paused briefly in the rooftop garden of the city`s exclusive L`Ermitage Hotel to talk about her career.
Her aristocratic profile was silhouetted against the bright afternoon California sunshine, her slate-gray eyes shielded behind dark glasses.
Long considered by beauty connoisseurs the world over to be the epitome of enigmatic sensuality and grace, the English actress was easily recognized by others in the garden.
Rampling, the star of such celebrated celluloid ”scandales” and tours de force as ”The Night Porter,” ”The Damned,” ”Farewell My Lovely,”
”The Verdict” and now ”Angel Heart,” giggled as she sipped a glass of red wine.
”I think it`s jet lag,” she said. ”I get giggly when I`m tired.”
She had flown in from Paris by way of Houston, where her husband, French composer Jean-Michel Jarre, had wooed the Lone Star State with a one-night multimedia extravaganza. ”Houston is so peculiar. You look out one hotel window and it`s just like midtown Manhattan, while out the other there`s nothing but fields and a few pigs wandering around. . . . It`s nice to be back in Hollywood again, even if it`s only for a few hours. We leave again for New York in the morning, and then it`s back to Paris again. God, you`d think I`d be used to all this traveling by now.”
The way Rampling used to live was ”much like a gypsy,” she said, perhaps a result of an extremely peripatetic childhood. ”I was an army brat, and we`d be constantly on the move. The disadvantages were that you`d never stay in one place long enough to make great friends, but then you`d be thrown back on your own resources, and perhaps that`s how I first got the taste for performing. I remember doing a lot of amateur dramatics with my sister
–singing and dancing, etc. The other great advantage was that I spent several years in France and learned the language, which helps enormously now that I`m married to a Frenchman and live there too.”
The actress got her first ”and very lucky” break when she landed the lead role in a John Boulting film, ”Rotten to the Core,” at age 17. ”I just couldn`t resist the title,” she said, ”although my debut proper was a small part in Richard Lester`s `The Knack.` Anyhow, that launched my career, almost before I`d even consciously decided to become an actress, and suddenly there I was–though I didn`t quite know where `there` was. Things just snowballed from there on, I guess.”
As it turned out, Rampling spent the next few years living and working in Italy with such legends as (Luchino) Visconti and (Liliana) Cavani. ”It really was quite extraordinary,” she said. ”There I was, 20 years old and still quite green, and to be literally swept away by Visconti and taken under his wing while we made `The Damned`–it was an incredible experience. I became his sort of protege and stayed at his villa for a long time, which was all a great training for me. Everything he did was on such a gradiose scale and very operatic. What a character!
`After the intensity of doing that film, I had a very strong love affair with Italy,” she said wistfully. ”They seemed to like me a lot, so I just stayed on, wandering around and still living out of suitcases. When it comes to being passionately involved with their art, the Italians are truly wonderful, and the country gave me a heartbeat, a pulse. America, or Hollywood, is so different, because it`s so business oriented: Everything`s geared to profit and loss.
”Anyway, I ended up making five films there, including `The Night Porter` which became so notorious,” she said with a smile. ”It`s really all Dirk Bogarde`s fault that I became involved in that cause celebre. Of course, I knew him from `The Damned,` and we`d become good friends. So when he called me up and told me we both had to do it, what could I say? Next thing I knew, he`d called up Cavani–the writer and eventual director–and told her that I`m the only person who can play the part.
”Well, apparently she hemmed and hawed and said reasonably enough that I was still not that well known, and why doesn`t he get someone like Romy Schneider, who was a big star at the time? But Dirk refused and said, `I`ll only do it if Charlotte does it,` so we all met and Cavani then agreed and persuaded the producers to go ahead with the project. The funny thing is that there was hardly any budget, but everyone felt so strongly about it that they worked incredibly hard to make it happen. And of course when it did, it created one hell of a furor because of the subject matter.”
After the red-hot intensity of such a productive period, perhaps it was inevitable that Rampling`s career appeared to cool off a little during the
`70s. ”It was a strange time for me. Obviously the late `60s and early
`70s were incredible for me, and hopefully the late `80s are going to be as good. In between? I don`t know.
”I moved to America for a year, to get out of London and work on a couple of films. . . . , `The Ski Bum,` which was based on Roman Gary`s novel, and `Corky,` with Robert Blake. And then I did stuff like `Foxtrot` with Peter O`Toole, and `Orca` with Richard Harris. Harris was pretty funny to work with because we were shooting up in some god-forsaken location in Newfoundland, and he said `you have to drink just to keep warm here.` He`d come on like a roaring lion, but he was very sweet when he was sober.
”And then there was `Farewell My Lovely,` with Robert Mitchum, which was a fun movie to do. He was wonderful to play against, and for me he really captured the essence of the Philip Marlowe character, and not all of it was acting, either. He liked to stay up all night carousing and then slouch onto the set, totally in character. God knows how he got any sleep.
”But generally I think I got a bit confused during the `70s, and I came off the rails a bit in the sense that my own private life wasn`t giving me what I wanted or needed. I suppose I was a bit of a mess until I met Jean-Michel.”
Rampling`s highly-publicized liaisons and unorthodox domestic arrangements during this period read like a real-life version of one of her more steamy celluloid roles. ”I was living with two men at the same time, my manager and a model, basically because I couldn`t make up my mind between them. It was your classic menage a trois, and it upset a lot people, believe me.”
In any event, she married the manager, had a baby and then met Jarre.
”It was still suitcase time for me, even though I`d acquired a family by now and a house near St. Tropez. We met at a dinner party and then again by chance when I went up to Paris to promote `Farewell My Lovely.` At first we both decided we`d be very adult about it and go back to our respective spouses –he also had a wife and baby. But within a week we both knew it was totally impossible, so we both got divorces, married and we`ve been together ever since.”
Jarre has provided Rampling with the emotional anchor she needed without cramping her wanderlust. ”It`s a perfect match because being a musician, he`s also a great wanderer,” she said, ”but he also gives me the stability and security I`d always lacked in my life. The thing is, when I met him, my priorities suddenly became much clearer because I didn`t have to live on a film set anymore. Here was a man who took care of me and gave me a home. Before that, movies and living out fantasies on the set was the only important thing to me.
”So after the turmoil of the divorces, etc., we decided to put down roots and took the kids–one from each marriage and one of our own–and settled down outside Paris, where we still live today.”
Off the road, the couple live a ”very low-key lifestyle,” according to Rampling. ”I love meeting people when I`m traveling, but once we get home again, we just close the doors and shut out the world.”
”We don`t socialize much because it bores me,” she added. ”I hate anything that`s repetitive–and that`s very repetitive. You see the same people, discuss the same old things, the same old gossip.. it just dosen`t interest me.” Rampling is greatly interested in her own work and her husband`s. ”I love what he does, and I love to follow him around the world and see his shows,” she said. ”And the great thing for us is that there`s no ego or jealousy problems–we`re both very satisfied with our respective careers. Mind you, if he was an actor it might be very different. Two actors under one roof must be hell!”
Some people have suggested to her that a happy marriage and home life have somewhat interfered with her own career. Rampling disagrees. ”I needed this stability in my life. At the same time, I`d decided to cut back on work anyway and just do certain projects that really interested me. So for about five years, I only did a few films–”Stardust Memories”, with Woody Allen,
”The Verdict” with Paul Newman and a couple of French movies.”
Today, however, Rampling is busier than ever, it seems. She`s starred in two more French films, including a black comedy titled ”Max Mon Amour” and a thriller called ”He Died With His Eyes Open,” and is now back on American screens in Parker`s voodoo thriller, ”Angel Heart.”
Despite her recent higher profile in America, Rampling still sees herself as being ”essentially outside the Hollywood mainstream. I feel I`ve always been the type of actress who`s not particularly classifiable, or a type. Yes, I do American films, but my whole outlook and background is European, and I mainly do a lot of European movies that simply don`t get distributed over here for one reason or another, which is a shame. And if you want to get into the Hollywood mainstream and bigtime, you have to have those huge hits that make you `bankable` star-power, or whatever they call it.
”No, I`m happy with my career the way it is, and I choose it that way because work is part of my life, but only part, and my life evolves even if I don`t work for two years. I adore my work, but I`m certainly not driven to do every part I get offered, and there`s no way I`ll do something if it doesn`t feel right.
”It really doesn`t matter to me whether it`s a tiny production or a huge big-budget picture or a film that may never get a wide release–I just have to have that feeling for it.”
