An untouchable star

This slight book comes with heavy baggage. In 2009, Rampling handed back a hefty advance for her contribution to a conventional authorised biography, and then used the Human Rights Act to prevent Barbara Victor from publishing anything based on their collaboration, on the grounds that it would violate her right to privacy. The Mail typically demanded to know ‘what can possibly remain untold in her audaciously open life’. What it meant was that, having been so extensively naked on-screen,
Rampling had no business pulling down the shutters on her private life.

But Rampling’s extraordinary sexiness has always derived from an immaculate meeting of exposure and reserve. Even with her breasts bare in eroto-Nazi costume for The Night Porter, her eyes are scrutinising and her mouth tight-lipped, with the disarming effect of making the gazer feel like the gazed-at. This is the expression she wears on the cover of Who I Am, the book we get instead of that conventional biography: a picture of her young self, fresh-faced and knowing, but only telling at her own discretion.

We’re told that this is ‘not a biography, or a song, or a betrayal, barely a novel — let’s say a ballad’, which is a very vague way of saying we are being offered something very vague. Who I Am blurs the relationship of ghostwriter and subject by wrapping the voices of Rampling and co-author Christophe Bataille around each other: his narration runs into hers, ‘you’s and ‘I’s shifting around between paragraphs. It’s all achingly self-aware, or as Rampling says of a teenage foray into cabaret with her sister Sarah, the two of them dressed in fishnets and berets: ‘It was so French.’

At first, it seems that this is going to be a book about looking, turning the reader’s prurient itch to know about Rampling’s celebrity ménages and marriages back against us.