A neat trick, exuding mystique and down-to-earth affability at the sametime. Isabella Rossellini’s silent-movie-star features and milkycomplexion have twice compelled the cosmetics house Lancôme to make herits public face—first in the 1980s, and once again in 2016, the yearshe turned 64. But Rossellini is also a freewheelin’ gal with mudbeneath her fingernails, raising chickens and harvesting honey on herorganic farm in Brookhaven, New York, out on Long Island. A lifelonglover of animals, she has made a mark in recent years with her wonderfulGreen p*rno series of Web shorts about animal behavior, produced for theSundance Channel and featuring Rossellini in all manner of beaky andbuggy costumes, delivering uninhibitedly silly but genuinely educationalmonologues. (“When they come out of the egg sac, my babies areravenous. If I don’t let them eat me, they would eat each other. Wespiders. . . are cannibals!”) As an actress, Rossellini is stillbest known for her performance as a nightclub singer in David Lynch’sBlue Velvet, but she cuts a fierce figure in Hulu’s new dramatic seriesShut Eye, as the matriarch of a Roma crime family that controls L.A.’snetwork of psychic shops. (A much richer premise than it sounds.)Herewith, some facts and insights gleaned from an afternoon conversationwith the uncategorizable star.
SHE SHARES a birthday, June 18, with her twin sister, Ingrid, and SirPaul McCartney. She has been thrilled by the McCartney coincidence sincechildhood, and, she says, “I always wish him a very happybirthday—mentally, because I have never met him.”
SHE IS especially keen on two breeds of heritage chicken that she israising, the Campine, an ancient Flemish bird said to have been covetedby Julius Caesar, and the Cochin, “lovely because it’s very feathery.”
SHE RAISES her chickens for eggs, not for meat.
HER NAMELESS farm (“Everybody calls it Isabella’s Farm”) is part of aCommunity Supported Agriculture (C.S.A.) cooperative that sells eggs andproduce to Long Island locals and to such Brooklyn restaurants asRoman’s and Marlow & Daughters.
SHE IS slowly pursuing, between acting jobs, a master’s degree in animalbehavior and conservation at Hunter College, in New York City.
SHE COMMUTES to school from Long Island by train. She finds driving“boring,” though, via farm life, she has learned to drive a pickup anda snowplow.
SHE IS fluent in French, English, and Italian. She grew up conversingwith her parents, the Swedish actress Ingrid Bergman and the Italiandirector Roberto Rossellini, in French and Italian. She did not pick upEnglish until she was in her 20s.
SHE HAS spent much of her adult life in the United States and is anaturalized U.S. citizen. She feels American “in the way that I’mworking—to evolve from modeling into acting, directing, writing, andgoing back to school,” she says. “It’s America that gave me that senseof freedom and possibility.”
SHE HAS two adult children: Elettra Wiedemann, a model turned foodwriter and editor, and a son, Roberto Rossellini (named for hisgrandfather), a model and aspiring photographer.
SHE RECALLS the impetus for Elettra’s getting into food writing to bethe fundamental modeling question, How do I eat and not get fat?“Unfortunately,” she says, “the answer is ‘Do not eat pasta.’ ”
SHE LOVES pasta. So, she says, did her father, who, in the days beforethe widespread availability of quality Italian groceries outside ofItaly, “traveled with pasta in his luggage.”
SHE BELIEVES that the foremost trait she inherited from her father isbeing a good raconteur.
SHE BELIEVES that the foremost trait she inherited from her mother isbeing orderly: “I clean my house frantically, like she did.”
OF THE celebrated individuals she got to meet thanks to her parents, shewas most inspired by the Magnum photographer Eve Arnold, the journalistOriana Fallaci, and the director Federico Fellini.
SHE HAS met two U.S. presidents, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.
SHE WAS forever transformed, at the age of 14, when her father gave herthe book King Solomon’s Ring (1949), a seminal study of animalpsychology and intelligence by the Austrian scientist Konrad Lorenz.
GIVEN HER zoological bent, she surprised her relatives in her late 20swhen she fell into, of all things, modeling: “When I became a model,the family was like, ‘Whaaat? Her?’ ”
SHE CREDITS her fashion-world experience with helping her create theelaborate costumes for her Green p*rno films.
SHE DESCRIBES her deadpan commitment to playing horny, confused, andfearful animals as “my homage to Buster Keaton.”
SHE HAS now taken the Green p*rno concept on the road, performingmonologues onstage, Spalding Gray-style. Her next one is entitled“Intelligence,” though she is aware that the scientific communitywould prefer her to use the term “cognition.”
REGARDLESS OF terminology, she is endlessly fascinated by animalbehavior—how, for example, a trained Seeing Eye dog understands acommand to find its master a chair. “If you think about chairs,” shesays, “a chair can be a bench. It can be a sofa. It can be, you know,designed by Le Corbusier. And they’re able to generalize! How do theyget that? They don’t sit on chairs! That’s a cognitive ability.”
Once Upon a Time in Italy
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