By Melena Ryzik
“Her name is Georgia O’Keeffe,” Isabella Rossellini said, as she dove her hands into the outrageously fluffy and dense coat of a Lincoln Longwool sheep, a rare English breed. Next up, weaving around the patio furniture, was Toto, a fleecy Finn. “Toto always wags his tail,” she said, giving him a pat. Animals in Rossellini’s heritage flock had eagerly come trotting over as soon as they spotted her: The matriarch and founder of Mama Farm was home.
Besides being a caretaker and trove of animal facts, Rossellini is also, at 72, a first-time Oscar nominee, as a supporting actress, for her small but pivotal role in “Conclave.” As Sister Agnes, an alert Mother Superior who holds her tongue until her morals lead her otherwise, Rossellini has some of the best lines in the movie. The Vatican-set dramatic thriller, about choosing a new pope, is also up for seven other awards, including best picture.
For Rossellini, who imagined that notable acting jobs were in her rearview, it was an unexpected, and overwhelming, recognition. She is now in the record books, as one of the few mother-daughter pairs to be nominated: Her mother, Ingrid Bergman, was up for seven Oscars and won three, starting in 1944. If Rossellini goes home with the prize, it would make them the first winning mother-daughter twosome in history. Rossellini’s father, neorealist filmmaker Roberto Rossellini, also landed one nomination, in 1950.
Red carpets, she said, are much more intense since she made the rounds with Martin Scorsese, her first husband, circa “Raging Bull,” or attended the Oscars with her former partner David Lynch, who directed her career-making performance in “Blue Velvet.” These days, she doesn’t mind begging off some events so she won’t miss her ornithology classes.
“I have a wonderful life here,” she said, and lit up telling me about Mama Farm’s plans to make rugs (patchwork wool, “so with your feet, you can learn about different heritage breeds!”) and the science of domestication. She hopes that subject will be a follow-up to her hit “Green Porno” series, in which she dressed up as various animals to describe their mating rituals (scientifically accurate but also totally wild, and hilarious).
Stanley Tucci, a co-star in “Conclave” and a close friend since they met on his beloved 1996 restaurant comedy, “Big Night,” said he was amazed from the start by the “brilliantly funny” Rossellini. (One of his daughters is named after her.) “Hers is a complex and curious mind,” he wrote in an email.
With a lifetime as a second-generation celebrity, and a long stint as the face of cosmetics giant Lancôme, “she’s just very, very self-aware,” said John Lithgow, another friend and frequent co-star, including in “Conclave.”
Her impact has not diminished. “Everybody is kind of stunned when they meet Isabella Rossellini,” Lithgow said. “I’ve seen it over and over.” But, he continued, “she just is so disarming.” He added: “She turns everybody into old friends, the instant they meet her. It’s a kind of magic act she does.”
Edward Berger, director of “Conclave,” said he needed someone formidable to play Sister Agnes, whose quietude encompasses power and the weight of truth, and offered the part to Rossellini. “She brings such history and such natural authority with her,” he said.
“The movie is very much also about the crack of femininity in a very patriarchal world, and Isabella represents that,” he added. “When you stand next to her, it’s almost like you’re in a beam of light.”
“Conclave” was filmed at Cinecittà, a storied Italian studio, where Rossellini spent time as a child, knocking around Federico Fellini’s sets and watching him coach his cast of nonactors. “I remember Fellini showing them what to do,” Rossellini said of the filmmaker, a close friend of her father’s. Instead of having the amateurs try any dialogue, “they made them count, and then they dubbed them.”
Rossellini’s illustrious cinematic history is always within reach. Mama Farm is filled with mementos of her family, including a bedroom decorated with the banged-up helmets her father wore when he raced Ferraris, and a “Casablanca” magnet, with her mother’s famous profile, floating on the fridge. Lynch, her partner from “Blue Velvet” (1986) to “Wild at Heart” (1990), designed the blue-and-white dishware stacked neatly in the kitchen. (Lynch died in January. She helped present him with an honorary Oscar in 2019.)
In “A Season With Isabella Rossellini,” a documentary streaming on the Criterion Channel, and in her memoir, she also spills good-naturedly about Scorsese.
When she started modeling, in the early ’80s, he was very jealous. “He kept saying, ‘This is my wife, how can you be a sex symbol?’’” she recalls, laughing, in the documentary. His producer offered her money to stop appearing on magazine covers. It wouldn’t have been much: She wrote in the book that she was paid $150 for her first Vogue covers (less than $500 in today’s dollars). But she didn’t mind the sum because the exposure brought her the lucrative contract for Lancôme, for whom she was a global spokesmodel for about 15 years.
After Lancôme rejected her when she was in her 40s, for being too old, and movie work seemed scarce, she reinvented her focus, toward farm life and education. She earned a master’s degree from Hunter College in 2019, in animal behavior and conservation. Her thesis was her one-woman and one-dog performance piece, “Link Link Circus,” about communication among other species.
What Rossellini didn’t anticipate, in this busy chapter, is a career revival. Lancôme rehired her, as a brand ambassador, when she was in her 60s. Acting jobs materialized: She is currently filming a Ryan Murphy series, in which her foul-mouthed character is the opposite of a nun. Murphy gushed to her about how memorable she was in “Death Becomes Her,” a 1992 black comedy (now a Broadway musical). “She’s like, ‘I’m just starting to realize that people thought I was good! I never knew!’” he recalled.
Acting, Rossellini has said, still feeds her brain. And that’s what propels her. Lately she has been thinking about earning her Ph.D. “I went back to school at 55,” she said. “I thought I was too late, and it wasn’t too late. It’s useless to say, ‘Now it’s too late.’ Well, you know, you live until you die.”
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