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 curtsy when she finishes her monologue. That flounce — at once polite and a kiss-off — was an audience favorite, an applause moment from the very first screening, at the Telluride Film Festival. “The power of the curtsy — none of us had a clue,” Berger said. “It was definitely her.”
“Conclave” was filmed at Cinecittà, the storied Italian studio, where Rossellini spent time as a child, knocking around Federico Fellini’s sets and watching him coach his cast of nonactors. “I remember Fellini showing them what to do,” Rossellini said of the filmmaker, 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 mementos 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 modeling, 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 $150 for her first Vogue covers (less than $500 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.