Isabella Rossellini: Animal Expert, Gay Icon, and Oscar Contender
Hereâs what sharing a meal with Isabella Rossellini is like, according to a friend whoâs known her for 30ish years. âSheâs the best dinner companion. Sheâs one of the funniest people Iâve ever met. She loves to eat and she knows food from all over the world,â says Stanley Tucci, a reliable authority on what makes a solid dinner companion. Early last year, on their first night out in Rome, where Rossellini grew up and where they were shooting their papal thriller Conclave, she picked out a favorite spot from her youth. âItâs a very old-style Roman restaurant with white tablecloths, not frilly. You feel like youâre going back in time to 1960s Rome,â Tucci says. âSheâs a great raconteur. You just never want the dinner to end.â
It only takes one morning spent with Rossellini to realize Tucci isnât exaggerating. She may be global cinema royalty, her parents being the Italian filmmaker Roberto Rossellini and the Swedish star Ingrid Bergman, but sit down with her and youâll meet an unfiltered, warmhearted riot. Forget the famous romantic partners, like David Lynch and Martin Scorsese and Gary Oldman. Put those brilliant performances in the likes of Blue Velvet, Fearless, and even 30 Rock to the side for a moment. On this September morning in Toronto, Rossellini gossips and reminisces with a wide, almost innocent smile and a belly laugh that echoes through the hotel restaurant. You sense Rosselliniâs joy is rooted back on her 28-acre Long Island farm, the new site of her day-to-day worldâand a nice metaphor for a long life of defying conventional Hollywood wisdom.
âI want to eat at the end of my life. Iâll say that, whatever I did in my life, I wasnât thin,â she says. âI canât beâI have a farm. Iâve got to eat.â
Rossellini has traveled north of the border to promote Conclave, an Oscar contender set in the Vatican and focused on a bunch of cardinals lying, backstabbing, and strategizing to become the next Pope after the incumbent suddenlyâand mysteriouslyâdies. Rosselliniâs Sister Agnes, who oversees the nuns of the congregation, holds crucial information as to whether foul play was involved. For most of the movie, though, she doesnât speak. âIt was important to show the submissive role that the church requires the nuns to have,â Rossellini says. The filmâs director, Edward Berger, tells me: âIt takes a great amount of charisma to be able to not then disappear into the background as an actress. This role embodies the fact that the oldest patriarch in the world is still ruling in its way, and Isabella is at the core of its crumbling foundations.â
âI went to nun school. My nuns were not at all submissiveâthey ran the school, they knew what to do, they had long discussions, they had authority,â Rossellini says. Conclave builds toward a terrific showstopping scene for Rossellini, in which Agnes puts the duplicitous men in their place with one of the greatest curtseys ever committed to film. Itâs elicited applause in screenings all around the world, from Colorado to Canada to England to Spain.
Conclave is based on a novel by Robert Harris, directed by All Quiet on the Western Frontâs Oscar nominee Berger, and stars Oscar nominees Ralph Fiennes, John Lithgow, and Tucci. Thatâs the kind of pedigree that awards voters instantly take seriously. âDavid Lynch said to me, âI heard Conclave is very good, Iâll go see it,ââ Rossellini says. âBut he never goes out!â Itâs been a long time since Rossellini, despite her brilliantly mercurial screen presence and her singular filmography, has been in a movie generating so much noise. âI donât receive many scripts,â she tells me. âAll my life theyâve said, âIsabella, you have an accent. You canât work in America if you have an accent.â My roles were limited.â
Rossellini keenly understands that business should have no impact on a creative life. Growing up in Rome, she watched her father make movies his own way, often to little commercial success. âHe said, âOne day youâll thank me that Iâm poorââhe didnât have any money because there was freedom,â she says. âThere is something to be said about that.â Rossellini has faced her own education in that regard. Sheâd only made four movies before Lynch contacted her about Blue Velvet, a psychosexual thriller in which Rosselliniâs nightclub singer is thrust into a twisted game of lust and power. âHe called me one day and said, âIsabella, you want to make a film about lesbians? You like this kind of thing,ââ Rossellini recalls, roaring with laughter. âDavid didnât expect this film to be very successful. I donât even know that he liked it particularly.â
Its ecstatic, if polarized, reception designated Rossellini and her costar Laura Dernâanother daughter of the industryâas arthouse darlings, especially good timing since Rossellini was just settling into her role as LancĂŽmeâs exclusive spokeswoman. The filming experience also established a deep bond between the two stars. âMeeting her meant meeting inspiration and being introduced to some of my greatest teachers through her,â Dern tells me. âBeing shown art and nature like I had never known before.â In Dern, meanwhile, Rossellini found a rare example of an actress taking charge behind the scenes, optioning books, and developing scripts. âI couldnât believe it,â Rossellini says. âI asked, âLaura, were you as extraordinary at 14?ââ
Rossellini brings this example up for the way it informs her own trajectory. Like most women of her generation, Rossellini felt the sexist pinch of an industry obsessed by appearance and youth. In 1996, when she was in her early 40s, she was dropped by LancĂŽme and told: âA woman at 42 cannot represent a womanâs dream because women dream to be young.â The word spread. âLittle by little, nobody was working with me,â Rossellini says. Her then agent told her, âIâve lost interest in you.â The jobs dried up. âI always thought that people stayed with you out of a European politenessâlike, once a year theyâd go to dinner or something and talk about the industry,â she says. âBut no, he just left me.â
The telling of this story might inspire, in some, a softened voice or a solemn change in expression. Yet Rossellini smiles again, connecting this tale of ugly, if familiar, gender politics to the strength and legacy of her parents. Her mother was all but thrown out of Hollywood after the scandal of her romance with Roberto Rossellini. âShe was in her 40s and her career just little by little didnât workâI remember mama being home for three years without work, and she loved acting,â Rossellini says. âSo I thought, Well, the time has come. I have a new chapter ahead of me.â
She can quickly identify the fans that have stuck around. âIf somebody says to me, âI loved you in Death Becomes Her,ââ Rossellini says, pointing at me, âI say, âI know youâre gay!ââ She claims to be right about 90% of the time.
Somewhere along the way, Rossellini has emerged in broader gay culture as a beloved icon. She sees queer people dressing up for Halloween like her characters in Blue Velvet and Death Becomes Her, the latter of which finds her mysterious socialite giving Meryl Streep the potion of youth. She meets particular engagement on Instagram for her pure, uplifting farm content. She gets quoted constantly for her gonzo delivery of her great 30 Rock line, âOh, damn it, Johnny! You know I love my Big Beef and Cheddar!â The connection is palpable, the love there authentic and enduring and mutual. âI was put a little bit at the margins because Iâm a foreigner, I was always old and fat,â she says with a smirk. âYou have to live by your wits and your humor.â As for Death Becomes Herâs specific place in the canon: âWe didnât know that we were going to make an iconic film for the gay community. We did a film that we thought was going to be like Forrest Gump or Roger Rabbit.â
One of Rosselliniâs more recent collaborators, the filmmaker and comedian Julio Torres (Problemista, which Rossellini narrated), points to a movie she made in her early 50s, The Saddest Music in the World, as the project that got him hooked on her oeuvre. âIf memory serves me rightâand you might have to fact check thisâI believe that she plays this woman with a glass leg,â he says. (Heâs right, but Iâll add that both glass legs are filled with beer.) âI have this memory of, as a teenager, seeking it out and watching her and being so mesmerized by it.â The movie, Rosselliniâs first of many collaborations with Canadian director Guy Maddin, fueled Torresâs curiosity about her. Eventually, through illegal torrenting or however he found stuff online in the aughts, he found Green Porno.
Rossellini had the idea for Green Porno when she was 14. She finally made it 40-plus years laterâwriting, directing, and starring in the series of short films about animal sexual behavior, which aired on the Sundance Channel and was regularly mocked by Joel McHale on E!âs The Soup (source: my teenage self). A sampling of lines of dialogue delivered by Rossellini in Green Porno: swimming around as a female duck, âThey all want to mate with me with their corkscrew penises.â Buzzing around in a bee costume, âIf I were a queen bee, I would be very fat, and do nothing else but lay eggs.â Playing a dragonfly, âBut first, I will clean her vagina⊠so that she will only have my babies.â The series is invigoratingly DIY, animated with cardboard cutouts and enlivened by Rosselliniâs comic but committed performances. Theyâre strange enough to compel you to keep watching, if also thoroughly educational.
âGreen Porno is actually a very important piece of media for her and her legacy because it says, âWhen left to my own devices, Iâm actually very funny and very curious and very inventive,ââ Torres says. âWhat really makes it feel inclusive is that it feels attainable somehow. It feels like she did it with her friends. For me as a young artist, that was very, very inspiringâmore than something that feels so completely out of reach.â
Now Rossellini wonders, âWhy did it take so long? I could have done so much more and developed that voice.â Sheâs working on another project to direct about the animal world, to build on Green Porno. If she were to go back, though, she says she wouldâve been a directorâfor her generation of women in the industry, making that mental leap was difficult. Her mother had once confessed to her that she wanted to direct tooââlike it was a secret.â Rossellini was recently pointed to an Interview magazine cover from decades ago, back when she was in her 20s. In it, she said, âI would like to make films about animals.â She sighs, saying it aloud again. âI even declared it publicly, but I never had the confidence to sit down and write it and try.â
Over the last decade, the now 72-year-old Rossellini both reteamed with LancĂŽme in a company rebrand, and received her masterâs degree in animal behavior at Hunter College in New York. She first enrolled less than a decade ago and thought she was getting out of acting altogether; for the first time since the early â80s, she went years without appearing in a film. âI started a farm, thereâs bees everywhereâI didnât think I was going to go back into acting until it came back,â she says. âIâm at a certain age.â At Hunter, her fellow students didnât know who her mother or father was, but occasionally, sheâd get the question that makes her giggle: You did Green Porno?
Both those whoâve called Rossellini a friend for years and those who came up on her work speak of her as a deep inspiration. Tucci, who directed and acted opposite her in 1996âs Big Night, tells me of her, âSheâs the same but better, in the sense that, like all of us, sheâs just relaxed into herself more.â Dern says that âIsabella is pure art personifiedâshe is always creating and inventing and nurturing in every space she invents,â while Torres argues that âto think of her through the Hollywood lens feels wrong somehow. She feels like an artist who can dip her toes into different worlds, and that just happens to be one of the many worlds that sheâs been in.â
âI donât listen much to my agent or to this idea of a âcareer moveâ because I never heard my parents talk about career moves,â Rossellini says. âI donât trust it. When youâre very successful, they expect another successful film. They give you a lot of money, but you have to make a lot of money.â
And so here is Rossellini, whoâs operated âon the peripheryâ for most of her career, suddenly back in a big movie and making the prestige-festival-circuit rounds for the first time in who knows how long. Her first Oscar nomination is in the cards for Conclave, and the very idea of it makes her emotionalânot for herself, but for the sense of honoring her parents. The same reason she didnât bother seeking that kind of notoriety in the first place.
âMy mom got three Oscars, and I donât know how many times she was nominated; Iâve got nothing,â she says with one last, big laugh, before starting to tear up. âNow I want so much to be remembered as theirâoh my gosh, it makes me cryâas their daughter, because thatâs been forgotten a little bit. There is stewardship. There is something that you continue with the same love. I love films. I restored my fatherâs and motherâs films. Iâm addicted to the Criterion Channel. I go to Bologna every year to see the restorations. And the Oscar is the only award that encompasses all of thisâthe greatness, the glamour, but also theâ.â
She stops herself, grasping for the word. âThe lineage?â I ask. She nods. âThe lineage.â
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