Seven sphinxes posed in front of the Louvre pyramid at the end of September. They were ambassadors for the Lancôme brand, including singer Aya Nakamura, actress Penelope Cruz and influencer Chiara Ferragni. All of them looked serious – apart from Isabella Rossellini, whose broad, warm smile matched the decoration on her caftan. It's an understatement to say that the Italian-American model stands out in the world of "muses": Now 71 years old, the model has forged her own path away from fashion, wearing her roles of actress, model and farmer with ease and creativity.

Two months later, we met her in a plush hotel just a stone's throw from the Louvre. Connected to one of its exhibitions, the museum had asked her to curate a program of films set in Naples, one of her "favorite cities" along with Paris, Rome and New York. During our meeting, she drank water, as an aperitif. That's how Rossellini lives: one foot in luxury, the other in rusticity. In her language, sumptuousness and simplicity sound synonymous.

In that way, she resembles her character in Alice Rohrwacher's La Chimera, released on December 6. In it, she plays an ex-entertainer living in a magnificent but dilapidated villa, refusing to believe in the death of one of her daughters. "We don't know whether she's wise or nuts," she explained cheerfully, in perfect French – the language in which her parents loved each other. She does not lack in pedigree. Her mother was the Swedish actress Ingrid Bergman, encapsulating the famous "fire under the ice" of Hitchcock's iconic leading women. Her father was the Italian filmmaker Roberto Rossellini, concealing, beneath his mantle as "father of neorealism," a pronounced taste for life and speed – "Dad was a great Grand Prix racer," recalled Isabella, mischievously rolling her eyes.

She has a rare ability to combine contrasts. This gift caught the eye of the Italian director Alice Rohrwacher, who believes it goes way back: From an early age, Isabella learned to share – before sharing her talent and beauty with the world, she had to make room for her twin sister, Isotta, in her mother's womb. The actress feels a real partnership with Alice, she said. Both polyglots, they live in the countryside, Rohrwacher in central Italy, Rossellini on the east coast of the United States. The 41-year-old filmmaker remembered coming across Rossellini on television, when she was interviewing members of the New York avant garde for a famous Italian program.

Rossellini left her native Rome at the age of 16 to join her mother in New York, where she quickly carved out a niche for herself as a journalist, model and actress. She reveled in the difference in morals that separated the two sides of the Atlantic. "Americans always ask themselves, 'How can I make a difference?' The weight of history makes Italians more fatalistic. More imaginative, too." And she recounted how actor George Sanders, well-versed in Hollywood pragmatism, was horrified by the improvised nature of the shooting of Journey to Italy (1954), her father's masterpiece. It was with this film that she opened her personal selection at the Louvre in mid-November. As a prelude, she broadcast an interview with Martin Scorsese, her ex-husband, in which he declared his love for this standard of cinematic modernity. "In some ways, Dad and 'Marty' are alike: spiritual, jealous..." she said, with tenderness.

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