12/08/2024
We are talking, again, about that ethology degree – which she eventually put to use in 2013 by buying and managing a 28-acre farmstead, 60 miles from New York City in Long Island. A conservation-minded community space where animals – including poultry, sheep and goats – are reared but never slaughtered, Mama Farm was born of weekend trips to the countryside with her children. “Then a piece of land came available and somebody suggested, why don’t you buy it and make a farm and take it away from the developer? And I did. It was ignorance and optimism. I didn’t know how hard it was. It’s still very hard.” She laughs. “But I don’t have a lot: I don’t want to die and have my children be like, Oh my God, what do we do with 5,000 sheep?”
Rossellini’s life is a happy balance of family, farming, film and other, more particular passions: she’s excited to begin touring her self-written one-woman show, Darwin’s Smile – “about the expression of emotion of actors and animals” – in France. For someone who has long been the face of anti-aging products, she’s decidedly pro-aging herself.
“You know, you get wrinkles and you get fat and you lose a kind of beauty – that is true,” she says. “But they never talk about the freedom that comes with that. More than freedom, a lightness. When you’re young, you have so many things to prove. You have to prove that you are intelligent, that you’re financially independent, that you’re a good parent. There are so many obligations. And when you’re old, you’re not proving yourself any more. I don’t know if I’m that intelligent or not. I am who I am. You start to say, if I don’t do what I want to do now, I will never do it. And life becomes more fun.”—Isabella Rossellini to Guy Lodge for
📸 Ali Smith
