Isabella Rossellini: ‘I’ve learned so much watching - rather than eating - my 120 chickens

I live on a 21-acre farm in the countryside near Bellport, Long Island, and we have a lot of vegetables and a lot of eggs from rare heirloom chickens and there’s nothing like them. The taste of our carrots, which two minutes before were in the ground, is incredible. We’re a co-op so my eggs and honey are distributed to people on the farm. Bee-keeping is like raising Martians.

Italy is basically an agricultural country with a climate and culinary tradition to match. In Italy, hardly anyone goes to the supermarket for food.

We had a babysitter who cooked. Mum never cooked. She was an actress [Ingrid Bergman] and her favourite phrase was “room service”. I remember once my father [director Roberto Rossellini] was being interviewed by a journalist who asked, “What sort of father are you?” and my dad replied: “I’m a Jewish mother.” And like a lot of Italian men, one of his moments of machismo was making his pasta sauce, which all the family had to be in awe of.

I think I was the last generation to have a wet nurse. We had Matilde for more than nine months and she came from a village outside Rome where they advertised “Come to the city and breastfeed”. I refer to Matilde’s son Giuseppe as my milk brother. I have a daughter [Elettra Wiedemann], who does the blog Impatient Foodie and recently had a baby and wants to be a mama for a while. It’s not easy, but she’s keen on giving her own milk and has a lactation consultant.

My mother had a collection of utensils hanging on the wall, most of them sadly lost now. You’d take them if needed. I had dinner recently with someone who also had forks, knifes and spoons which you’d bring to the table in a box for guests to take from. I use that as an example of Swedish frugality, practicality and elegance.

As a girl I had scoliosis, a deformity of the spine. I had casts and stretching operations and it went on and on. It was very painful and had many complications. I always hoped to be home because the food in hospital was very heavy and not good. I was immobile for about a year and lost weight. I remember people saying, “Try to eat, try to eat.”

When I was 24 I was doing commercials for Rabarbaro Grappa, an Italian liqueur made out of rhubarb. When Nixon opened up China the company received their rhubarb from there. I travelled to China as a model and found this amazing rhubarb which was like a tree, which they used the root of for that liqueur. I was photographed next to this Chinese rhubarb, an absolutely huge rhubarb which dies out every year and then grows again.

When I was married to Martin Scorsese his mother cooked most of the food. She was a wonderful cook and stocked our refrigerator so we could have a week of food.

Another man I know who has a real passion for food is Stanley Tucci. He co-directed and wrote this beautiful script about food and family for the film Big Night and I acted in it alongside him. But I think the script could have been about art, or farming, or bee-keeping or another field. Anything you love and want to keep pure. I always have a conflict about how commercial I want my organic farm to be.

We have a group on several fields of my farm called the Long Island Native Plant Initiative, which works with Cornell University to collect Long Island plants, selecting seeds to help keep biodiversity.

You work less as an actress when you’re 45 or 50 and you don’t work at all as a model. I had a lot of time on my hands and so I went back and studied what I’ve always wanted to study - conservation and then animal behaviour. I’ve two exams to go for my Masters. I’ve learned so much watching and studying - rather than eating - my 120 chickens. Animals are the greatest show on Earth.