Isabella Rossellini: Animal Expert, Gay Icon, and Oscar Contender

Here’s what sharing a meal with Isabella Rossellini is like, according to a friend who’s known her for 30ish years. “She’s the best dinner companion. She’s one of the funniest people I’ve ever met. She loves to eat and she knows food from all over the world,” 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. “It’s a very old-style Roman restaurant with white tablecloths, not frilly. You feel like you’re going back in time to 1960s Rome,” Tucci says. “She’s a great raconteur. You just never want the dinner to end.”

It only takes one morning spent with Rossellini to realize Tucci isn’t 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 you’ll 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 Rossellini’s joy is rooted back on her 28-acre Long Island farm, the new site of her day-to-day world—and a nice metaphor for a long life of defying conventional Hollywood wisdom.

“I want to eat at the end of my life. I’ll say that, whatever I did in my life, I wasn’t thin,” she says. “I can’t be—I have a farm. I’ve got to eat.”

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 suddenly—and mysteriously—dies. Rossellini’s 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 doesn’t speak. “It was important to show the submissive role that the church requires the nuns to have,” Rossellini says. The film’s director, Edward Berger, tells me: “It 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.”

“I went to nun school. My nuns were not at all submissive—they ran the school, they knew what to do, they had long discussions, they had authority,” 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. It’s 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 Front’s Oscar nominee Berger, and stars Oscar nominees Ralph Fiennes, John Lithgow, and Tucci. That’s the kind of pedigree that awards voters instantly take seriously. “David Lynch said to me, ‘I heard Conclave is very good, I’ll go see it,’” Rossellini says. “But he never goes out!” It’s 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. “I don’t receive many scripts,” she tells me. “All my life they’ve said, ‘Isabella, you have an accent. You can’t work in America if you have an accent.’ My roles were limited.”

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. “He said, ‘One day you’ll thank me that I’m poor’—he didn’t have any money because there was freedom,” she says. “There is something to be said about that.” Rossellini has faced her own education in that regard. She’d only made four movies before Lynch contacted her about Blue Velvet, a psychosexual thriller in which Rossellini’s nightclub singer is thrust into a twisted game of lust and power. “He called me one day and said, ‘Isabella, you want to make a film about lesbians? You like this kind of thing,’” Rossellini recalls, roaring with laughter. “David didn’t expect this film to be very successful. I don’t even know that he liked it particularly.”

Its ecstatic, if polarized, reception designated Rossellini and her costar Laura Dern—another daughter of the industry—as arthouse darlings, especially good timing since Rossellini was just settling into her role as Lancôme’s exclusive spokeswoman. The filming experience also established a deep bond between the two stars. “Meeting her meant meeting inspiration and being introduced to some of my greatest teachers through her,” Dern tells me. “Being shown art and nature like I had never known before.” In Dern, meanwhile, Rossellini found a rare example of an actress taking charge behind the scenes, optioning books, and developing scripts. “I couldn’t believe it,” Rossellini says. “I asked, ‘Laura, were you as extraordinary at 14?’”

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 Lancôme and told: “A woman at 42 cannot represent a woman’s dream because women dream to be young.” The word spread. “Little by little, nobody was working with me,” Rossellini says. Her then agent told her, “I’ve lost interest in you.” The jobs dried up. “I always thought that people stayed with you out of a European politeness—like, once a year they’d go to dinner or something and talk about the industry,” she says. “But no, he just left me.”

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. “She was in her 40s and her career just little by little didn’t work—I remember mama being home for three years without work, and she loved acting,” Rossellini says. “So I thought, Well, the time has come. I have a new chapter ahead of me.”

She can quickly identify the fans that have stuck around. “If somebody says to me, ‘I loved you in Death Becomes Her,’” Rossellini says, pointing at me, “I say, ‘I know you’re gay!’” 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, “Oh, damn it, Johnny! You know I love my Big Beef and Cheddar!” The connection is palpable, the love there authentic and enduring and mutual. “I was put a little bit at the margins because I’m a foreigner, I was always old and fat,” she says with a smirk. “You have to live by your wits and your humor.” As for Death Becomes Her’s specific place in the canon: “We didn’t 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.”

One of Rossellini’s 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. “If memory serves me right—and you might have to fact check this—I believe that she plays this woman with a glass leg,” he says. (He’s right, but I’ll add that both glass legs are filled with beer.) “I have this memory of, as a teenager, seeking it out and watching her and being so mesmerized by it.” The movie, Rossellini’s first of many collaborations with Canadian director Guy Maddin, fueled Torres’s 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 later—writing, 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!’s The Soup (source: my teenage self). A sampling of lines of dialogue delivered by Rossellini in Green Porno: swimming around as a female duck, “They all want to mate with me with their corkscrew penises.” Buzzing around in a bee costume, “If I were a queen bee, I would be very fat, and do nothing else but lay eggs.” Playing a dragonfly, “But first, I will clean her vagina… so that she will only have my babies.” The series is invigoratingly DIY, animated with cardboard cutouts and enlivened by Rossellini’s comic but committed performances. They’re strange enough to compel you to keep watching, if also thoroughly educational.

“Green Porno is actually a very important piece of media for her and her legacy because it says, ‘When left to my own devices, I’m actually very funny and very curious and very inventive,’” Torres says. “What 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 inspiring—more than something that feels so completely out of reach.”

Now Rossellini wonders, “Why did it take so long? I could have done so much more and developed that voice.” She’s 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 would’ve been a director—for 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 too—“like it was a secret.” Rossellini was recently pointed to an Interview magazine cover from decades ago, back when she was in her 20s. In it, she said, “I would like to make films about animals.” She sighs, saying it aloud again. “I even declared it publicly, but I never had the confidence to sit down and write it and try.”

Over the last decade, the now 72-year-old Rossellini both reteamed with Lancôme in a company rebrand, and received her master’s 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 ’80s, she went years without appearing in a film. “I started a farm, there’s bees everywhere—I didn’t think I was going to go back into acting until it came back,” she says. “I’m at a certain age.” At Hunter, her fellow students didn’t know who her mother or father was, but occasionally, she’d get the question that makes her giggle: You did Green Porno?

Both those who’ve 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 1996’s Big Night, tells me of her, “She’s the same but better, in the sense that, like all of us, she’s just relaxed into herself more.” Dern says that “Isabella is pure art personified—she is always creating and inventing and nurturing in every space she invents,” while Torres argues that “to 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 she’s been in.”

“I don’t listen much to my agent or to this idea of a ‘career move’ because I never heard my parents talk about career moves,” Rossellini says. “I don’t trust it. When you’re very successful, they expect another successful film. They give you a lot of money, but you have to make a lot of money.”

And so here is Rossellini, who’s operated “on the periphery” 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 emotional—not for herself, but for the sense of honoring her parents. The same reason she didn’t bother seeking that kind of notoriety in the first place.

“My mom got three Oscars, and I don’t know how many times she was nominated; I’ve got nothing,” she says with one last, big laugh, before starting to tear up. “Now I want so much to be remembered as their—oh my gosh, it makes me cry—as their daughter, because that’s been forgotten a little bit. There is stewardship. There is something that you continue with the same love. I love films. I restored my father’s and mother’s films. I’m 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 this—the greatness, the glamour, but also the—.”

She stops herself, grasping for the word. “The lineage?” I ask. She nods. “The lineage.”

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