Have y’all seen the ads for Conclave? It looks so good, and it looks like it might be a quiet Oscar contender. It’s about a papal conclave at the Vatican, where the priests and bishops are trying to select a new pope after the “heir apparent” died mysteriously. Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci and John Lithgow star. Isabella Rossellini apparently has a gangbusters supporting role as a nun, in what’s supposed to be a crucial role. Rossellini doesn’t work that much anymore and the whole film and her performance are getting a lot of Oscar buzz. Isabella recently spoke to Vanity Fair about Conclave, her career, and life in general. I was so charmed by this interview, but I always love Isabella Rossellini. Some highlights:
Her 28-acre Long Island farm: “I want to eat at the end of my life. I’ll say that, whatever I did in my life, I wasn’t thin. I can’t be—I have a farm. I’ve got to eat.”
For most of ‘Conclave’, she doesn’t speak. “It was important to show the submissive role that the church requires the nuns to have…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.”
She doesn’t get much work: “I don’t receive many scripts. 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.”
On David Lynch’s Blue Velvet: “He called me one day and said, ‘Isabella, you want to make a film about lesbians? You like this kind of thing.’ David didn’t expect this film to be very successful. I don’t even know that he liked it particularly.”
She was dropped by Lancôme in her early 40s 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. But no, he just left me.”
Remembering how her mother went through a similar drought: “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. So I thought, Well, the time has come. I have a new chapter ahead of me.”
Living in the margins: “I was put a little bit at the margins because I’m a foreigner, I was always old and fat. 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.”
Her life in the past 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. I’m at a certain age. 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. 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.”
The lineage: “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—The lineage.”
If Focus Features puts some money into Conclave’s Oscar campaign, Isabella has an excellent backstory for Supporting Actress – one of the original “nepo babies,” the lineage of Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini, the Oscar history of her mother, the fact that the industry has treated Isabella so unkindly but she still has managed this brilliant comeback with grace and humor. Come on… this needs to happen. Anyway, I love her and I love that she’s going to spend the next three months talking about how she’s old and she loves to eat.
Photos courtesy of Cover Images.