popcultured

THERE’S a paradox at Diane Keaton’s core. “I like to disappear,” she said the other day, in a burst of candor. “But there is that other side — I’m trying to exhibit myself.” It’s a conflict, she added, “that’s classic for people who want attention.”
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At the Palm Court of the Plaza Hotel on Tuesday morning, Ms. Keaton was on show for sure — early-bird diners straining for a glimpse of the star as she strode to a corner table — and all the more intent on keeping her light under wraps. She was sheathed in a tweedy Burberry coat, its black-gray palette understated almost to a fault, as if to deflect untoward stares.

“I guess some people are just more open than I am to being exhibitionists,” Ms. Keaton said. “For me it is always ‘yes and no, yes and no,’ ” she added with a pendulumlike wave of her palm. Like a lot of performers, Colleen, Ms. Keaton’s character in the tart new comedy “Morning Glory,” which opened in theaters this week, faces no such quandary. A flinty, self-venerating anchor on a struggling morning news show, she is, Ms. Keaton said, “the woman you love to hate.” The hyper-groomed Colleen is tenacious about keeping up appearances and hanging on to her job even if it means having to, literally, kiss a frog on the air, an act she performs with hilarious panache in the film.

“One element of the character is her vanity,” Ms. Keaton said. She spends earlier scenes preening, her perky blond coif lacquered to catch the light, her eyes rimmed in black for maximum impact, her curves enhanced by an array of form-fitting costumes. Colleen’s appearance was modeled on an amalgam of morning-show hosts, and in particular Diane Sawyer, who in Ms. Keaton’s view is among the most glamorous of that breed. Like Colleen, “I’m vain,” Ms. Keaton said. “I wanted her to be attractive.”

The role is a departure for the defiantly inconspicuous — and eccentric — star. Ms. Keaton, 64, has after all spent the better part of a near 40-year film career playing an assortment of tentative, endearingly flighty characters, masking her allure beneath layers of cloth, her face and frame obscured by bowler hats, oversize jackets, calf-grazing skirts and gloves — to say nothing of the high-necked sweaters she has worn for years like talismans.

Her resolutely low-key manner, shared in varying degrees by some of her Hollywood contemporaries — Blythe Danner, Meryl Streep, Sissy Spacek and the late Jill Clayburgh come to mind — has certainly set her apart. Today scores of would-be divas coming into their own tend to flaunt on and off the screen what Ms. Keaton has always preferred to conceal.

More brass would have been required of her had she come up in the show-all, tell-all circus that is Hollywood today. “It seems like a large component of success now is the seduction of imagery,” she said. “You have to do everything to make a dent,” vamp for magazine covers, design a fashion line, show a lot of skin, Ms. Keaton said without the faintest hint of judgment.

Recently she came across a photograph of Kim Kardashian in W, clothed in nothing but a coat of silver paint. “My jaw dropped,” Ms. Keaton said admiringly. “I couldn’t get over that silver bottom.” Such brazen images are everywhere, she noted. “They’re in your face, and you have to accept that.”

With her latest role, Ms. Keaton seems to have embraced a hint of the flashiness that she has long shunned. She remembered pleading with the film’s crew to pump up Colleen, “pick up the lights,” emphasize her glamour and brash self-assurance. She recalled that while working with Frank L. Fleming, the costume designer, “we tried to put me in tight clothes, fitted shirts and pencil skirts that were supposed to give me a waistline.”

When it came to signaling her sex appeal, Ms. Keaton played it both ways. “We opened up her neck,” Mr. Fleming said, “but we gave her pearls to cover what she didn’t want to show.”

Colleen’s contour-hugging silhouette was a departure for Ms. Keaton, who prefers the relatively forgiving lines of coats and dresses by Marni, Balenciaga and Stella McCartney. “Silhouette, that’s not what I lead with,” said the actress whose keen fashion eye was trained on images of the lanky, sometimes shapeless models in the Vogue of the late 1960s and early ’70s.

In creating Colleen, she said, “it was all about her face — how we could keep it up.”

“She’s been a beauty queen.”

“When you lose that,” Ms. Keaton added, with evident empathy, “it’s a fall from grace.” Roger Michell, who directed Ms. Keaton, recalled: “She was very amused by the character’s vanity. She was self-aware and self-mocking — game enough to see the funny side of Colleen’s preoccupation with what she looks like.”

At the Plaza, Ms. Keaton returns to her default position. “I’m dedicated to the concept of coverage,” she said. She was not entirely joking when she talked about wanting to design her own line of turtlenecks — “in every color, even plaids.” The idea is not so far-fetched, given the many fashion offers that came her way, but which she rejected, in the wake of “Annie Hall,” the late 1970s film that had Ms. Keaton showing off a haphazard chic that was built around mannish hats, baggy pants and boyfriend jackets — a look that has made a splash on recent fashion runways.

Concealment has its upside. “It’s something that I’ve mastered,” Ms. Keaton said. Her tendency to hide, she confided, is among her greatest flaws. “But I’ve turned that into a good thing.”

A version of this article appeared in print on November 14, 2010, on page ST2 of the New York edition.

source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/fashion/14Keaton.html?ex=1305694800&en=89ead5e045c17199&ei=5087&WT.mc_id=MO-D-I-NYT-MOD-MOD-M176-ROS-1110-L1&WT.mc_ev=click