Isabella Rossellini: ‘I was afraid to be compared to my mother’

The legendary star of ‘Blue Velvet’ is earning Oscar buzz for her performance as a mischievous nun in the papal thriller ‘Conclave’. She speaks to Adam White about comparisons to her mother Ingrid Bergman, the controversy that surrounded her star-making film, and her romances with Martin Scorsese and David Lynch

‘Now I do it all – I can play ambassadors and I can play shells’ (Getty Images)

Isabella Rossellini is a very considerate interviewee. She provides me full names, accurate dates and historical context, as if fact-checking for me in real time. “You have to maybe explain to your readers that my mama was a big Hollywood star,” she tells me early on, in that unmistakable continental purr. “Her name was Ingrid Bergman.” As if Rossellini’s face – lifted more or less wholesale from the Casablanca star – wasn’t enough of a clue.

If I were speaking to Rossellini decades ago – say, 10 or so years before she traumatised audiences in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet – she may not have been as forthcoming. Back then she felt her lineage was more of a hindrance. There was Bergman, yes, but also her father, the Italian neorealist filmmaker Roberto Rossellini.

“Mama so wished for me to be an actor,” the 72-year-old recalls now, dressed in a black blouse and trousers in a London hotel suite, her fingers playing with the string of pearls decorating her neck. “But there was so much press, so much judgment. My mum was so established, and I was afraid to be compared to her. I could never be as good as her.”

Bergman had asked the then 24-year-old Rossellini to play a nun waiting by her character’s deathbed in 1976’s A Matter of Time, a surrealist musical also starring Liza Minnelli. Wouldn’t it be interesting if her character felt as if she was hallucinating her younger self, Bergman thought. Those twinned faces – might as well use ’em. Rossellini was hesitant but Bergman insisted.  “She said it was ridiculous that I was intimidated by her,” Rossellini continues. “She said, yes, maybe at the beginning they will compare us, but soon you’ll have your own work and they will judge you for that instead.”

But A Matter of Time did not go well. “Oh, it was rough,” she hoots. “The media judged me so badly. For my first few roles, really. But then they calmed down.” She lets out a grand sigh of relief. “And I get offended now if I’m not asked about being Ingrid Bergman’s daughter!”

We are talking about nuns because Rossellini is playing one again, and to far better reviews this time around. “Thank God,” she laughs. She is a true gobbler of scenes in this week’s Conclave, a delicious mystery-cum-thriller about a troupe of ruthless Catholic priests electing a new pope. Ralph Fiennes is the vaping cardinal organising the titular conclave, with Stanley Tucci and John Lithgow among the candidates. Rossellini is the wild card: the ambiguous Sister Agnes, who may possess valuable secrets.

David Lynch very much wanted Helen Mirren for ‘Blue Velvet’. But Helen didn’t want to do the film because it was controversial. I liked the script quite a lot, but I understood what she meant

“She doesn’t say much, but she sees and listens and judges,” Rossellini explains, each word spoken with piercing gravitas. “She is a shadow. A constant presence. She understands she has no authority. Until, you know, she speaks up.” At festival screenings, one scene towards the end of the film – in which her character’s perpetual hovering proves mightily significant – has inspired cheers and gasps from audiences. “She says what has been on the minds of everybody watching,” Rossellini smiles. Much like Sister Agnes, we must say no more.

Conclave feels like the peak of a remarkable few years for Rossellini, who has transformed into something of a cameo queen. The film arrives on the heels of similarly acclaimed turns in Alice Rohrwacher’s fantastical Josh O’Connor vehicle La chimera and the cult animated film Marcel the Shell with Shoes On in which she voiced an elderly anthropomorphic seashell. Adam Sandler’s surreal Netflix film Spaceman and the oddball comedy Problemista have also been graced with her presence of late.

Nun of your business: Rossellini as Sister Agnes in ‘Conclave’ (Focus Features)

“I’m very grateful,” she says. “Film has come back.” When Bergman’s own work began to dry up as she hit her forties, she warned her daughter that it was something she, too, would one day face. To combat her Hollywood slump, Bergman moved to London to work in the theatre. “Because in the theatre, she said, you’re so far away from the audience that you can still play the love interest – there are no close-ups!”

When Rossellini experienced her slump in the late Noughties, she stayed busy by going to school to study the science of animal behaviour. She made quirky short films about the sex lives of insects, riffing on what she’d been taught, and titled them Green Porno. Then Rossellini bought a 28-acre farm near Long Island, New York, where she looks after a host of animals to this day. Farm life has brought with it an unexpected new following – her Instagram, where she showcases day-to-day trials such as “trying to eat a salad in the presence of sheep”, delights nearly a million subscribers. “People talk to me about the farm as much as they talk about mama and Casablanca now,” she laughs.

Today, she confesses she is feeling frazzled. “I had a nightmare about the farm again,” she says. Her first night in London had coincided with a storm hitting Florida. “It is the other side of the country to me, but I woke up saying, ‘Oh my God – I don’t have an emergency plan for my animals if we have a hurricane!’” Once her Conclave press is over, she is determined to sort it out. “They have a little shed, but I don’t want them to go up like The Wizard of Oz, you know?”

There’s something quite mystical about Rossellini. Due to her parentage, Rossellini seems to bridge the gap between classic filmmaking and the modern day. And, due to her most famous relationships, bridge the beginnings of New Hollywood and the many decades of filmmaking it influenced; when she was working exclusively as a model in the Seventies, she married Martin Scorsese, then fresh from Taxi Driver. After they broke up, she began dating David Lynch. For years she orbited some of the most brilliant minds in cinema.

“Common interest is attractive,” she grins. “They have a deep love for film, which I do, too – so of course I felt attracted to Marty and David. But there was also a certain familiarity in the lifestyle, too – it’s quite unusual. You travel all over the world. You’re long absent. But because of my parents it wasn’t intimidating to me. It was what I was used to.” (She was later engaged to Gary Oldman, but is currently single.)

Though Rossellini didn’t begin acting in earnest until after her divorce from Scorsese in 1982, after four years of marriage, she felt as if she was always creating characters. “[American photographer] Richard Avedon told me that being a model is a little bit like being a silent movie star,” she remembers. “He’d say, ‘I’m not photographing a beautiful nose, I’m photographing emotion, and you’re giving me all this emotion in front of the camera’.” Avedon was convinced she could act. “He said all I needed to do was to add a voice to what I was already doing.”

Face/off: Rossellini in 1971, at 19, with her mother Ingrid Bergman (Getty Images)

That voice proved initially problematic, though. It’s one of the things she loves about her recent acting renaissance – now her accent is an asset. “When I was younger, I only heard complaints about it,” she remembers. “I’d hear, Oh, we wanted to cast you, but this is a family of characters – why would one member of the family speak differently to the others? But all of a sudden people want my voice.”

Both Marcel the Shell with Shoes On and Pixar’s Incredibles 2 – where she played a foreign dignitary – sought Rossellini out to play characters from “invented” lands. “They wanted them to have fantasy origins, or an accent that’s not linked to anything.” It is true – Rossellini has a voice that could be Italian as much as it could be French or American. From somewhere in space, even. “So now I do it all,” she says. “I can play ambassadors and I can play shells.”

But Rossellini has always been drawn to roles that defy simple explanation. When she was asked by Lynch to play Dorothy Vallens in Blue Velvet, a lounge singer brutally beaten by her psychotic lover (Dennis Hopper) and slipping into insanity herself, she knew that others had already turned it down. “He very much wanted Helen Mirren,” she remembers. “But Helen didn’t want to do the film because it was controversial. I liked the script quite a lot, but I understood what she meant.”

Scorsese, then a good friend, insisted she give Lynch a chance. “He said, ‘Oh my God, don’t hesitate! Have you seen Eraserhead?’ – at that point I had only seen The Elephant Man, which was a much more traditional film. Marty goes, ‘OK, Elephant Man is good – but Eraserhead is something else!’” She cackles.

She and Lynch spoke for hours about Dorothy’s character, how she had become so used to sexual violence that she had begun to enact it herself, and even enjoy it. “I started to feel confident that I could play it,” she says. “I read books about Stockholm Syndrome, and women who experience years of extreme abuse – at a certain point they can start self-inflicting pain. I thought Dorothy would be one of those women.” She pauses. “So that’s why, I think, Blue Velvet was so controversial. Dorothy was a victim, but also the perpetrator – and that was the first time many had seen something like that.”

Controversy: Rossellini with Kyle MacLachlan in David Lynch’s influential thriller ‘Blue Velvet’ (Shutterstock)

Rossellini was an internationally famous model by that point, a regular on magazine covers and the face of Lancôme. Surely it was incredibly ballsy to go from posing in Vogue to performing intense degradation on screen? “I don’t think it was courage,” she suggests. “Maybe it was more family tradition.” Rossellini is speaking about her mother’s choice to work with her father, an Italian, at the peak of her American fame – and just after the Second World War. “Italians were the enemies at that point, and so associated with being allied with the Nazis,” she says. “So, I think I grew up with that incredible sense of adventure and experimentation.”

Plus, she was so used to being told no that she would always figure, what the hell? “I felt marginal,” she says. “The accent, my age – I started acting at 30. I had this feeling that I would never succeed at it, so why not try this and that?”

She remembers a day on the set of 1992’s Death Becomes Her, the cult fantasy comedy in which she played an ageless sorceress who supplies Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn with eternal youth. She noticed her director, Back to the Future’s Robert Zemeckis, looking glum. “I said, ‘Bob, what’s wrong?’ He said, ‘I have the weight of the world on my shoulders.’ And it’s true. When you are very successful, they expect you to continue to be successful. But when you’re experimental, all you’re expected to do is experiment, and it’s fantastic.”

That, then, is why she does what she does.

“You don’t have these expectations put upon you,” she says. “So no, it wasn’t courage that brought me here. It was wanting to have fun.”

‘Conclave’ is in cinemas