From the streets of her Italian hometown to the fields of her feminist farm, Isabella Rossellini is living fearlessly, aging gracefully and laughing bawdily.
It’s a rare thing to see a movie star utterly disappear into a role. In Conclave, Isabella Rossellini does exactly that. With a largely silent, self-effacing performance, the 72-year-old actor and model pulls off a remarkable vanishing act as Sister Agnes, a stoic matron who manages the legion of nuns that serve the cardinals as they struggle to elect a new pope. The sole woman in an A-list ensemble led by Ralph Fiennes, Rossellini’s character bustles through backrooms of the Vatican, a monochrome cipher in a sea of scarlet men. On paper, it’s a small part, with almost no dialogue and less than eight minutes of screen time. But as a nun who knows too much, Sister Agnes is a stealth weapon hiding in plain sight. A spy in the house of God. With every crisp gesture, sly glance and penetrating gaze, there are glints of a steel core. And when she finally breaks her silence, blindsiding the cardinals in the Vatican cafeteria, she blows the plot off its hinges with the finesse of a safecracker, then slips away.
Rossellini’s minimalist tour de force, honoured with a Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actress, has lent a feminist inflection to Conclave’s Oscar campaign, in which both Fiennes and the picture have emerged as leading contenders. And in a career spanning some 60 movies, this performance marks a counterintuitive comeback for an artist who has never really gone away. Ironically, by concealing her vivacious personality behind a dark scowl and a nun’s habit, Rossellini has regained the spotlight.
Not that she needs the attention. Having spent a lifetime in the public eye, she can slip her celebrity on and off with ease – and at an age where many actors fret about their expiry date, is busy re-hyphenating her career as an author-screenwriter-director-scientist-farmer-innkeeper. Four decades after her electrifying performance as the star of Blue Velvet, she has learned that there is more to art and life than carrying a movie. “I seldom had big lead roles,” she told me without a whiff of regret after Conclave’s premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival last fall. “Perhaps it’s because I have an accent and am difficult to cast. Sometimes small roles are nice. And you can play more than one when you dedicate three weeks to a film instead of three months.”
In a Zoomer interview alongside Conclave’s German director, Edward Berger – whose All Quiet on the Western Front (2022) won four Oscars – Rossellini is a picture of cosmopolitan panache, wearing a French-blue floral dress enveloped by a saffron robe that unfurls to reveal bold black-and-white lining. She says it was created for her by Nazzy Beglari, “a friend of mine who used to be a journalist and now travels the world and only works with small farmers and artisans, and handmade textiles.” (Beglari sources traditional ikat fabrics from Uzbekistan, India, Japan and Thailand to create wearable modern art for clients ranging from Tilda Swinton to Rossellini’s ex-husband Martin Scorsese.) Just as her casually regal fashion sense radiates substance, so does Rossellini’s acting, which seems to emanate from an underlying core of authenticity.
“This is the benign authority that she wears so lightly,” said Fiennes, as he presented her with the European Film Academy’s World Cinema Award in December. “It was extraordinary to witness close up. I think everyone who worked with her on Conclave felt this magnetic flow – the lightness of touch, the ease, the circling of the take, and then landing in it with complete assurance.” Casting Rossellini in Conclave was a no-brainer for its director. “Obviously she doesn’t have many lines,” says Berger. “But as an observer, she has her own thoughts that can’t be steered. For a role so quiet and restrained, you want someone who has an aura, who has charisma, who stays in our mind without doing much.”
Rossellini belongs to a singular breed of screen royalty that lies beyond Hollywood. It’s not rooted in money or power or even fame, but in a creative passion that, for her parents – Swedish screen legend Ingrid Bergman and Italian auteur Roberto Rossellini – was literally volcanic. Starring in such classics as Casablanca, Gaslight and Notorious, Bergman was one of Hollywood’s biggest stars when she fell in love with Rossellini’s films and wrote him a letter asking if they could work together. The result was Stromboli (1950), a doomed love story shot on a live volcano where the actress and the director, both married with children, had a scandalous affair that led to Bergman being denounced in the U.S. Congress as an adulterer pregnant with Rossellini’s child out of wedlock.
Isabella’s older brother, also named Roberto, was born the month Stromboli was released. After divorcing their spouses, the parents married when their son was a week old. Two years later, Bergman gave birth to Isabella and her twin sister, Ingrid. They were five when their parents divorced. Dad had eloped with Bengali screenwriter Sonali Dasgupta, who became his fourth and final wife. The director adopted Dasgupta’s son Gil, a film producer who died in 2008, and the couple had a daughter, Rafaella, an actress and model. (Isabella also has two older half-siblings, actress and journalist Pia Lindström and film producer Renzo Rossellini; while her father’s first child, Marco, died at age nine.)
Isabella lost her father when she was 25 and her mother at 30, yet they continue to be the greatest influence on her life and work. “More than anything, they were artists,” she says. “They never thought about success. They wished to have it – when you make a film, you want it to be successful – but it wasn’t the motor, the engine. I never heard them have a conversation about career moves.” While her father had qualms about his daughter becoming an actor, her mother encouraged her: “Mama loved acting. But she always said, ‘I didn’t choose acting, acting chose me.’ … Almost like a calling to be a nun.”
Bergman famously played a singing nun opposite Bing Crosby in The Bells of St. Mary’s (1945), earning one of her seven Oscar nominations. (She won three for Best Actress.) Three decades later, Isabella made her film debut, at 24, as a nun at the bedside of a dying countess played by her mother in A Matter of Time, directed by Vincente Minnelli. Considering Minnelli’s daughter Liza was also cast in the film, it was a virtual take-your-daughter-to-work production shot in Rome, Isabella’s home town. “Mother thought it would be fun to have the children on the set, and because she and I looked alike it would be an added thing that, while dying, she sees herself.
With her latest sister act in Conclave, Rossellini’s career has come full circle. And it brought her back to Rome and to the fabled Cinecittà studio where her father and Frederico Fellini made many films. Along with Fiennes and their co-star Stanley Tucci, Rossellini stayed at the Rhinoceros Roma, a hotel overlooking the ruins of the Forum, which to their delight turned into a farmers’ market on weekends. Tucci has done his share of gastro-tourism in the streets of Rome, as the epicure host of the TV show Searching For Italy. But it was Rossellini who led him to an obscure spot, L’Eau Vive, run by an order of Carmelite nuns. It was the one restaurant where her mother felt comfortable because its crowd of priests and sisters didn’t bother her for photos.
From one nun to another, over a span of half a century, the wild-card incarnations of Isabella’s career have seemed anything but planned, from her baring of body and soul in the late David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) to a 14-year stint as the face of Lancôme – which made her the world’s highest-paid supermodel before that was even a word. Lancôme fired her when she was 42, telling her, as she recalled in the Guardian, that “women dream to be young, so I couldn’t represent that dream.” Two decades later, with a woman at the helm, Lancôme rehired her as their brand ambassador.
The relative invisibility that age provides has come as “a relief,” says Rossellini. “You can still have your lovers and fall in love. But you don’t have that gaze. I found it hurtful. Men would always make comments. They’d whistle and say, ‘What a beautiful ass! What I would do to you if you came to my house.’ It wasn’t pleasant. It was embarrassing.” Then she adds, “Everybody complains about old age, but it comes with an enormous freedom. There’s a lot of obligation when you’re young, to impress the teacher, to make yourself financially independent. As you’re older, you just say, ‘I have to do what I want to do because I don’t have much time left.’”
And she’s not about to waste it looking for a new partner. Calling herself “happily single,” Rossellini says she hasn’t had a boyfriend for 25 years, except briefly during COVID. “But I’ve had marvellous husbands.” She had two short-lived marriages – first to Scorsese, then to production designer Jon Wiedemann, father to her daughter Elettra – and romances that include a four-year partnership with Lynch in the late 1980s and a two-year engagement in the mid-’90s to actor Gary Oldman. As a single mother, she adopted her son, Roberto Rossellini Jr., in 1993. Now he and Elettra both work with their mother on Mama Farm, a regenerative agriculture project and B&B that Isabella owns on Long Island, N.Y. Living in a house near the farm, surrounded by family, she revels in her role as “nonna” to her three grandsons, aged 11 months to seven years. On this past New Year’s Eve, home alone beside a sleeping infant, she posted a beaming selfie video on Instagram with a hushed greeting: “I’m whispering because I’m babysitting my grandchild!”
In her late 50s, an age that can be unkind to actresses, Rossellini reinvented her career by writing, co-directing and hosting a series of comic TV episodes inspired by her love of animals – exploring their sex lives in Green Porno and their maternal instincts in Mammas. “I wish I had started to direct earlier and make films about animals,” says Rossellini, who went back to university to earn a master’s degree in animal behaviour and conservation in 2019.
It was Winnipeg’s Guy Maddin, the master eccentric of Canadian cinema, who triggered her impulse to become a filmmaker after casting her in The Saddest Music in the World (2003). Maddin, 68, remembers being astonished when Rossellini showed up in Winnipeg two months before the shoot to talk about the movie. “I was so impressed,” he says, on the line from his hometown. “Later she confessed with a demonic laugh that she came early not because she was so keen to make the movie, but to make sure I wasn’t some sort of lunatic while there was still time to pull out.” Maddin, whose films are thick with silent-movie tropes, says he spent a lot of time with Rossellini in his apartment watching old Lon Chaney movies. “When I look through the camera, I see in black-and-white, and I could see her in black-and-white. She looked like Ingrid, and a bit like Roberto. She said she saw a lot in common between me and Roberto, that we both had a can-do approach to filmmaking. Her father famously tied a string to the toes of non-actors who were in his movies and pulled the string when it was their turn to say their lines. I was so jealous of that idea.”
Working in Maddin’s Winnipeg playhouse served as an inspiration to Rossellini, says his long-time producer, Jody Shapiro. “She just loved the process and how we all collaborated. It reminded her of the freedom that her father had making films.” And when she finally stepped behind the camera, Isabella found a freedom that was never an option for her mother. “I remember Mama once said, ‘You know, Bella, I can be a director,’ but like it was incredible, like she was going to be an astronaut. She worked with the best, but it never occurred to her to direct, or to option a book and produce it for herself.”
After filming Saddest Music, Rossellini invited Maddin to direct My Dad is 100 Years Old, a 2005 documentary short that she wrote about her late father to mark the centennial of his birth. She went on to co-direct three seasons of Green Porno with Shapiro, revealing a flair for ribald comedy that couldn’t be further from her Conclave nun or the face of Lancôme. Playing animals in cartoon-like costumes – as a shrimp or a snail, a spider or a whale – she created her own Science Gal genre of bestial sex farce. “She was always playing the male gender of some grotesquely copulating creature,” says Maddin. “She’s willing to be morbid but with a comedic lilt in her voice. And she has a great bawdy laugh if you come up with a suitably tasteless gag.”
When not making films, Rossellini keeps herself grounded on the farm she founded in 2013. Occupying 28 bucolic acres – less than two hours from New York City – the land is dedicated to heritage breeds, heirloom seeds, conservation and biodiversity. Guests staying at the farm’s B&B – which she built during COVID and where rooms start at US$350 a night – have the run of the property. Far from the madding crowd and the red carpets, they may well encounter a very different Rossellini from the movie star they know, collecting eggs from the chicken coop or tending the beehives. “On the farm, she’s got the overalls on,” says Shapiro. “She drives a rinky-dink golf cart up to the gate that’s broken and sits there with pliers and metal twine trying to fix it. Then she’s chasing after a sheep that got out or walking around looking at the soil, dirt under the fingernails. But it’s a magical place – it’s her spirit embodied on the land.”
Rossellini may have found a new vocation as Earth Mother, but she called her passion project Mama Farm “because so many mothers come with their children. The community flocked to it.” The B&B was inspired by the new Italian trend of agriturismo, or agricultural tourism. In Tuscany and Umbria, as small family farms became unsustainable, families began to invite tourists to stay with them and get a taste of country life – gardening, eating the produce, working with the animals. And Rossellini’s B&B throws in touches of cine-tourism, such as a David Lynch Room decorated with some of the director’s risqué art works. On Mama Farm, even the sheep are stars – a rare breed that Rossellini has raised and individually named after famous female artists, including Kahlo, O’Keefe and Garbo. She has also raised 150 chickens from a breed that she calls Andy Warhols in reference to their white tufted crests. (Her devotion to these birds inspired her to write and illustrate 2018’s My Chickens and I.) But there are no roosters to be found. If there’s such a thing as a feminist farm, this is it. All the animals are female and none end up slaughtered or eaten.
Even with the B&B, however, the enterprise is no cash cow. After 11 years, it still struggles while Rossellini’s acting jobs help keep it afloat. “How do you pay the employees, give them health insurance, and create a business that can work financially without me being an actress and bringing my money into it?” she sighs. “It’s loved, but it’s not financially viable. How do you create that?”
Then with a buoyant laugh she sweeps away her concerns. “My father’s films were not financially viable! Guy Maddin is not financially viable! But do we want a world without them? I want the world with my dad, Guy Maddin and my farm!”
Rossellini puts an original spin on having it all. It’s not about balancing career and marriage, independence and motherhood. She’s a self-possessed grandma close to her children, her grandkids and her farm community. After years of symbolizing beauty for a cosmetics brand, her un-lifted face goes without much makeup, unless it’s for a night on the red carpet. At the Golden Globes, she appeared as a show-stopping antithesis of Sister Agnes in a custom ensemble by Dolce & Gabbana – a cardinal-red dress embroidered with lace, a matching cape, ruby chandelier earrings, and bold red Lancôme lipstick. Yet after all her years of modelling, she finds the limelight unnerving. “The red carpets are terrifying to me,” she posted on Instagram. “My heart beats faster than when I am on stage.”
While glamour is always a high-wire act, Rossellini seems quite at home in her body, unafraid of aging. With 17 vertebrae screwed together from operations for scoliosis (when she was a child and again 12 years ago), she has her aches and pains. But in a recent conversation with Julia Louis-Dreyfus on the Seinfeld star’s Wiser Than Me podcast, Rossellini addressed getting older with blithe equanimity: “You just say, ‘I am that intelligent, this beautiful, this fat, this old, and you accept it. I lost my job for age, I got my job back for age. So my life is very based on age, but I never really think about it … I speak to so many friends who say, ‘I’m concerned about what I’m going to do when I’m old.’ And I have no problem. A wheelchair! Just wheel me in front of the coop and take me to the sheep.”
In her premature memoir, Some of Me, published when she was 45, Rossellini wrote, “I may not like myself old, but I like myself ancient.” She does have a timeless aura, which may reflect a wisdom passed on from her family, or something deeply ancestral, as old as the Aeolian winds and Homeric myths that swirl around the island of Stromboli. But despite the lasting influence of her parents (“I think about them every day.”), her experimental curiosity seems squarely aimed at the future. We’re at a moment when older actresses – Demi Moore, Angelina Jolie, Fernanda Torres and Nicole Kidman – are a force to be reckoned with. And Rossellini’s quiet master class in Conclave seems almost ahead of its time. A beacon for the kind of enduring power that doesn’t need ambition.
A version of this article appeared in the February/March 2025 issue with the headline ‘”The Zeitgeist”, p. 47.
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