Isabella Rossellini: ‘People never talk about the freedom, the lightness, that comes with ageing’
The Italian star is having a late career renaissance, including a powerful turn in acclaimed Vatican thriller Conclave. She talks about the serenity of being single, enjoying farming in later life – and what it means to be a nepo baby
M ost great female actors get to play a nun at some point in their career: a kind of thespian rite of passage that comes to many in their grande dame years. Isabella Rossellini, however, checked off that box in her very first screen appearance, aged 24: in 1976’s little-remembered Vincente Minnelli musical A Matter of Time, in a bit part opposite her mother, screen legend and three-time Oscar winner Ingrid Bergman.
“My mum was playing an eccentric countess, who’s dying, and she thought one of the nuns assisting her dying could be me,” she remembers. “Because we resembled each other, she thought it would be interesting for the countess to see her young self in me, in a kind of hallucination. But also, I think she wanted to tempt me to be an actress because she loved acting so much.” She grimaces at the memory. “It was not successful at all.”
Nearly half a century later, Rossellini has again donned a wimple, to rather more successful effect, in Edward Berger’s gripping Vatican thriller Conclave. Playing Sister Agnes, a sternly watchful nun overseeing the housekeeping for a high-stakes papal election, she’s a deceptively quiet, background figure for much of the proceedings – eventually granted one short, blistering speech that tilts the film on its axis. “I play a shadow,” she says. “The Catholic church is very patriarchal, the cardinals are only men, but the nuns aren’t subservient. They have enormous power. It was important to underline their silence, but that silence doesn’t have to be powerless. I grew up in Rome and went to Catholic school. I knew how to play that because I lived it.”
