Isabella Rossellini is a first-time Oscar nominee at 72 for her role in Conclave. Photo / Thea Traff, The New York Times
A scene-stealing role in Conclave brought her unexpected acclaim, and tears, at age 72. But she has built more than a life onscreen.
“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.
On a recent afternoon, Rossellini, a model turned actor turned animal behaviourist (“ethologist” is the term she uses), was giving a tour of her operation, nestled on 30 acres in this village in the middle of Long Island. There were goats and ducks and 150 chickens, now kept safely in their coops to protect them from bird flu.
Before she picked me up at the train station, she had checked on the bees personally – “because everyone’s afraid of them,” she said – making sure they had food and were warm enough. “They have to keep themselves at 97 degrees (36C), even if it is 20 (-6C) outside,” Rossellini said. “They do like the penguins – they create a ball, and vibrate to create heat.”
Besides being a caretaker and trove of animal facts, Rossellini is also, at 72, a first-time Oscar nominee, as a supporting actor, 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.
Rossellini cried when she learned she’d been nominated. “I was surprised to cry, but I was so moved – I think for the legacy, because I think my mom would have been so happy,” Rossellini said.
We were talking over an elegant, simple lunch of poached salmon and green beans, which Rossellini retrieved from the refrigerator at Mama Farm. She was dressed in black, with a Dolce & Gabbana polka dot sweater, and our conversation roamed freely: religion (“Conclave,” she said, “is about doubt”); how she acquired six Spanish cashmere goats; awards season.
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).
“You know, when we talk about evolution, we always talk about just survival of the fittest. But when it comes to domestication, it is the survival of the friendliest,” she said. “The wolf eats us. But now the dog is man’s best friend.” Aggression, a heavily studied subject, was one way to get ahead. But another, more recently acknowledged, is to build trust, earn confidence. “Cooperation has shaped the world as much as competition,” she said, adding: “That’s what I like. The good news.”
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.”
Born in Rome, Rossellini attended Catholic school there, and found the nuns not at all terrorising. She remembered them “being very, very sweet, very maternal,” she said. That they believed their work to be a calling reminded her of her mother, who viewed acting the same way. “She said, ‘I haven’t chosen acting; acting chose me,’” Rossellini said. “So, they were women that really lived their passion. And in that sense, they had authority. They were quite independent.”
In her 1997 memoir, Some of Me, Rossellini quotes the only performance advice her mother gave her: “Don’t do anything. It’s better than doing it wrong or badly. There will always be the violins to give your character the right mood.”
For Conclave, Rossellini was on set for only three weeks; her screen time amounts to less than 10 minutes, but scenes are shot from her point of view, making her character a crucial vantage point. She invented a background for Sister Agnes: Having been close to the Pope, she was probably very erudite, Rossellini reasoned, a scholar in religion, art or literature. “She listened,” Rossellini said. “She probably just listened because she wasn’t allowed to talk. So I listened very carefully.”
“It’s important to embody something, right?” she added.
At the end of her standout scene, in which she dresses down a roomful of cardinals, in particular Lithgow’s wayward character, Rossellini added something that wasn’t in the script, Berger said: a little curtsey when she finishes her monologue. That flounce – at once polite and a kiss-off – was an audience favourite, an applause moment from the very first screening, at the Telluride Film Festival. “The power of the curtsey – none of us had a clue,” Berger said. “It was definitely her.”
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 non-actors. “I remember Fellini showing them what to do,” Rossellini said of the film-maker, 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 mementoes 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 modelling, 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 US$150 ($263) for her first Vogue covers (less than US$500 [$875] 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, towards farm life and education. She earned a master’s degree from Hunter College in 2019, in animal behaviour and conservation. Her thesis was her one-woman and one-dog performance piece, Link Link Circus, about communication among other species.
“I learn from Isabella every day,” said her friend and Lynch-era co-star, Laura Dern. “It could be a lesson in humility, in shearing sheep, the sex life of shrimp or training a guide dog. I am never not having the time of my life learning from her.”
The farm, also a bed-and-breakfast, has become a community haven, with farmers’ markets, yoga classes, film screenings and more. Rossellini, who has long been single, hopes to endow it with financing from her acting projects, “so it can live beyond me,” she said. (Her daughter, Elettra Wiedemann, is the farm’s executive director.)
To spend time with Rossellini there, or possibly anywhere, is to encounter someone who has built, out of curiosity, energy, connection and resourcefulness, the best life for herself (if not the easiest). “She did what so many of us want to do but are afraid to do,” Tucci said, “which is to dive deeply into a subject that fascinates us, that is the opposite of our profession.”
And she still has a sense of mischievous fun. “She would call now and then and say, ‘Oh you’ve got to see the chapel made of bones!’” Lithgow said of their time filming Conclave. “She just knew all the secret parts of Rome.” (She took her co-stars to a restaurant run by chanting nuns, which she used to frequent with her mother, who could hide from paparazzi there.)
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 materialised: 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 realise 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 PhD. “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.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Melena Ryzik
Photographs by: Thea Traff
©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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