Isabella Rossellini on Hollywood Ageism, Playing a Scene-Stealing Nun in ‘Conclave,’ and Becoming a Long Island Farmer
Isabella Rossellini puts down her fork, straightens her back and shows me how she nailed a pivotal moment in her new movie, “Conclave,” a Vatican-set thriller that unfolds a world away from her 28-acre Long Island farm where we’re having lunch. In the scene, Rossellini’s character, a nun named Sister Agnes, is navigating a darkened hallway, trying to remain undetected, when she glimpses something mysterious unfolding a few feet in front of her.
“My heart has to beat much faster, so the camera picks it up,” Rossellini says. “Your breath has to translate that. So I …” And with this she inhales, drawing in oxygen as quietly as she can, filling the room with a sense of tension without saying a thing.
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It turns out great screen acting is all about waiting to exhale.
In “Conclave,” Sister Agnes tends to the fraternity of cardinals gathered to choose the next pope. She is often seen puttering around the perimeter of the male-dominated deliberations, but she’s rarely heard. That required Rossellini to convey reservoirs of suspicion with just a look or a gesture. Yet with only a few lines, she nearly steals the movie from heavyweights Ralph Fiennes, John Lithgow and Stanley Tucci, who chatter and bluster and debate as they outmaneuver each other for control of the Catholic Church.
“It’s a very difficult role to nail,” says Edward Berger, the film’s director. “Because you need that special extra something that not a lot of people have, and you need an actor who has confidence in their quietness. It would be easy to do too much. But Isabella is that rare person who can deliver a masterful performance with minimal expression.”
And make no mistake, Sister Agnes knows all. She may have been marginalized by a patriarchal system, but she is always a few steps ahead of the men who are grasping for the papal ring. “She hasn’t been squashed down,” says Rossellini. “She may have taken a vow of silence, but she’s not subservient. She’s very wise.”
In films like “Conclave” and last spring’s “La Chimera,” where she played a Miss Havisham-like matriarch, the 72-year-old Rossellini has reestablished herself as an arresting character actress, playing the kind of meaty parts that dried up when she reached middle age. But even as she’s enjoying a career resurgence, her heart lies here at Mama Farm, a bucolic getaway that she purchased in 2013. It’s where she harvests honey, grows vegetables from heritage seeds and oversees a predominantly female menagerie of goats, sheep and chickens. “The males fight each other,” she explains.
Rossellini has also recently opened a low-key bed-and-breakfast on the property, which is where we’re sitting on a sun porch, eating chicken salad and drinking kombucha as she tells me that this is “the happiest” she’s been. But it’s a hard-won contentment — one that required a reinvention after she was shunted aside by Hollywood and the modeling world after she entered her 40s. That’s when Rossellini, who had been the face of Lanc?me, was fired by the cosmetics company and unceremoniously informed that it needed a more youthful image. “Executives told me that advertising is about selling a dream, and when it comes to makeup, women dream of being young,” Rossellini remembers. “So a woman of 42, which I was when I was let go, cannot represent that dream.”
And the movie business, where Rossellini had made a name for herself starring in films like “Blue Velvet” and “Fearless,” was equally inhospitable. Around the time that Rossellini lost the Lanc?me contract, her agent of 20 years told her he had “lost interest” in guiding her career. After that, she struggled to find new representation, receiving the same blunt response from various agencies: “What do we do with an icon?” Rossellini repeats the last word, “icon,” her Italian accent becoming more pronounced as she picks at the corner of the cloth napkin on her lap. She’s all too aware of how an apparent compliment was just Hollywood-speak for “over the hill.” Then she shrugs. “I didn’t agree with it — it was an injustice, it was ageist — but I understood their rationale. In their mind, I was too old. There’s nothing I could do about that; I was only going to get older. So I said, ‘OK, time to find something else interesting and challenging.’”
Rossellini went back to school, finishing her undergraduate degree at NYU and then getting a master’s in animal behavior from Hunter College. She used that expertise to write, direct and star in “Green Porno,” a series of arty, educational and hilarious webisodes that debuted in 2008 and explored the mating rituals of everything from snails to sea lions over three seasons. Rossellini, who plays all the animals with a Buster Keaton physicality, donned elaborate costumes to demonstrate how a whale maintains an erection or anchovies enjoy ocean-based orgies.
“It’s my concession to commercialism,” Rossellini says of the focus on carnal matters. “If I made a video about teeth or mandible structure, nobody would watch it. But if you say ‘penis’ or ‘vagina,’ people start listening.”
She’s hoping to film another season of “Green Porno,” this one about the domestication of animals, but hasn’t figured out how to make it engaging. “I want it to be humorous,” she says. “But it’s easier to get people to laugh about sex.”
Rossellini has a European ease with eroticism. On-screen, she appeared completely nude in “Blue Velvet,” wandering through a suburban neighborhood, badly bruised and desperate for help. To convey her character’s torment, Rossellini held her arms by her side like wounded wings, mirroring the Nick Ut war photo of the burned Vietnamese girl, naked and wailing in agony after a napalm attack. “Her gesture was so helpless,” Rossellini recalls.
When she worked on “Death Becomes Her,” playing a socialite with the secret to eternal youth, she used a body double for a scene in which her character emerges from a swimming pool naked save for some high heel shoes. Rossellini told the film’s director, Robert Zemeckis, that she didn’t mind doing nudity, but she felt she wasn’t statuesque enough for that moment.
When it came time to shoot the sequence, she insisted on meeting the woman who would be supplying her backside. She wanted to deliver a message. “I went up to my double and I said, ‘I will stay here in my trailer. If you need me, just let me know and I’ll come out and be here with you.’ I was there like a mother saying, ‘I’m here to protect you.’”
When I get off the train in Patchogue, an unassuming town near the Fire Island ferry, where I’m meeting Rossellini on a cloudy July morning, she’s standing beside a weathered Lexus SUV.
Rossellini is dressed casually, wearing pants and a knit shirt, but she still looks regal and glamorous, commanding her section of the parking lot as she would a runway. It’s impossible not to be reminded of her mother, Ingrid Bergman, the screen icon who captivated Humphrey Bogart and bedeviled Cary Grant. And as she drives me through the town center and down a long, tree-lined driveway, the conversation moves seamlessly between her life as both a movie star and the daughter of film legends (her father was neorealist auteur Roberto Rossellini) and her current gig as a farmer. One moment she’s urging me to visit Cinecittà, the legendary studio in Rome where both of her parents worked and where “Conclave” was shot. Then she’s talking about nearly ruining a batch of honey yesterday because she rushed through its extraction. “We were in a hurry to get to the beach before it got too late,” she explains.
Shooting “Conclave” in Rome gave Rossellini the opportunity to return to the city where she grew up. It also allowed her to play tour guide. One night she took Lithgow and Tucci to L’Eau Vive, a French restaurant with frescoed ceilings that is run by Carmelite nuns. “I’d never been to any place like it,” says Tucci, who hosts a travel show about Italy’s cuisine. “As you eat, they sing hymns.”
The restaurant was a favorite of Bergman’s when she lived in Italy during her seven-year marriage to Roberto Rossellini. “She liked it because the nuns didn’t really know who she was and she was not bothered there,” Rossellini remembers. “Usually, when you’d be with Mama in a restaurant, people would keep interrupting the conversation we were having to get an autograph.”
Bergman endured a blistering level of scrutiny after meeting and having an affair with Rossellini’s father on the set of 1950’s “Stromboli.” She was married at the time, and when news broke that she was pregnant with Rossellini’s child, the blowback was ferocious. She was drummed out of the movie business and denounced on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Six years later, she would be welcomed back to Hollywood, going on to win Oscars for “Anastasia” and “Murder on the Orient Express,” but her experience stayed with her daughter.
“She followed her heart, but she also paid a terrible price for being so emancipated,” Rossellini says. “It’s complicated.”
Rossellini’s heart often led her to high-profile directors. She was married to Martin Scorsese for four years, living with the filmmaker as he labored over “Raging Bull.” Then, in the 1980s and early ’90s, she was involved with David Lynch as they worked together on “Blue Velvet” and “Wild at Heart.” She stays in touch with both men, seeing Lynch from time to time during visits to L.A. Rossellini admits that the breakups hurt, and she wishes she’d been able to keep collaborating with the “Twin Peaks” director, but she doesn’t have any lingering resentment over how things ended.
“We have so much history and so much affection. If you concentrate on that, you’ll be happier,” she says. “I had marvelous relationships with them. I think David and Marty love me, and I love them. There’s a part of you that never really stops being in love with them. You’re not in love in the sense that you want to be together, but you still care deeply about them. How could you not?”
Laura Dern, who appeared with Rossellini in the films she made with Lynch, praises her friend’s resilience and refusal to be undone by personal or professional setbacks. “I have never once felt any bitterness from Isabella,” she says. “I’ve never seen any rage. When she’s hurt, she doesn’t stay stuck in it. She knows the world isn’t fair, but you have to keep moving forward.”
And you never know what surprises may be around the bend. After dismissing Rossellini, Lanc?me hired her back in 2018. When the call came, Rossellini was incredulous, worried that returning to the company would dredge up all that history. But the executives were insistent: “Society has changed,” they told her. “You were considered old at 42, but age is no longer how we define beauty. You can tell that story better than anyone else.”
And Hollywood has come back around, with Rossellini appearing regularly in films like “Spaceman,” alongside Adam Sandler; “Joy,” where she went toe-to-toe with Jennifer Lawrence; and “Incredibles 2,” where her cosmopolitan air landed her the role of the Ambassador. “For some reason, they like me again,” she says.
But she also knows how fleeting it all is. In her 1997 memoir, “Some of Me,” Rossellini writes about her parents’ cinematic legacies, asking, “Is being remembered a kind of antidote to death? Is fame a sort of eternity?” Lately, she’s discovered that even legends have a shelf life.
“I used to be introduced as ‘Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini’s daughter,’ and it bothered me, because I would think, ‘I am my own person.’ But now, the younger generation doesn’t know them, and it breaks my heart. Their reputations outlived them, but fame is very brief.”
Instead of worrying about extending her time in the spotlight, Rossellini is considering ways to ensure that what she’s built here on Long Island outlasts her. The bed-and-breakfast provides revenue, and the farm sells organic eggs, honey, wool and vegetables. She plans to set aside money so Mama Farm can continue after she’s gone, but she worries there won’t be enough.
“If I die tomorrow, it will be fine,” she says. “If I last for 20 years, it could be a problem.”
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