Her manner is warm but I feel suddenly self-conscious, imagining that to her conservationist's eye, the space is under-utilised. A few years ago, the actress and former model decamped permanently from New York City for life in a converted barn in quiet Bellport, on Long Island. There she has dogs and pigs and chickens as pets and has established a small organic farm nearby. "I always liked the country, because my dogs were happy, my children were happier," she says.

On the increasingly rare occasions she stays in the city overnight, Rossellini arrives by public transport and stays with friends or family. "My daughter [model Elettra Wiedemann] is moving to Brooklyn, so I'm hoping there'll be a little bedroom for me there," she says, smiling. Trend-seekers needing further proof that Brooklyn is the new Manhattan should look no further than the news that the borough's Fort Greene neighbourhood will soon provide the crash pad for a distinguished heir to film royalty, the daughter of director Roberto Rossellini and actress Ingrid Bergman, to whom she bears a striking resemblance.

Having parked her small suitcase in the corner, Rossellini is grateful for a cup of tea, graciously declines pastries, inquires if I have any pain medication and admits apologetically to having a headache. Diva behaviour this is not.

In appearance, Rossellini, 61, manages a very appealing combination of practicality and jauntiness; trousers embellished with dragons, defiantly feminine short hair. Her neck is elaborately wrapped in a silk scarf, at once concealing the most traitorous signs of age and flaunting a maddeningly inimitable European chic.

She has a kind of serene beauty - large, soft eyes flanked by smile lines, full lips and generous cheeks that make her look persistently youthful. "One is immediately struck by how glamorous she is - that's obvious," says director Guy Maddin, with whom she has worked on five film projects. "Then comes the Swedish pragmatism. When I first met her she had just cut her own hair. She loves the subway and the bus and practical shoes and walking her dogs."

She is also kind and forthcoming and very funny. She laughs long and loud. "She's a legendary supermodel of unsurpassable grace," muses Maddin. "But she's also as bawdy as a dockworker. She's both cool as a fiord and a hot, hand-talking Mediterranean."

This last revelation will be less surprising to anyone who has seen the short environmental films Rossellini writes, co-directs and acts in. For two minutes apiece she disports herself in a dazzling array of lunatic costumes: in one, she wears a fat suit and wields an enormous whale penis; in another she plays a snail that defecates on its own face, merely sighing at the indignity. She also enthusiastically humps a fly, wonders aloud how a firefly "lights up its ass", and swoons in the arms of a prawn. Immobilised by an earthworm costume, with only her face visible, she delivers her lines with a strangely sexy resignation: "To have babies, I need to mate with a hermaphrodite - in the 69 position." The apparently low-budget costumes and sets, all papier mâché and fabric, were designed to be "cartoonishly" simple and colourful in order to be seen on mobile devices.

The first of these short films, commissioned in 2008 by Robert Redford for broadcast on Sundance Channel's website under the collective title of Green Porno, were about the sex lives of animals, a subject suggested by Rossellini herself. Subsequent commissions came - for a series entitled Seduce Me, about animal courtship rituals, and Mammas, a look at the maternal instinct. There are now 40 in all, plus a book and DVD, and she has also made a one-hour documentary, Animals Distract Me.

Rossellini traces her fascination with animals back to her childhood, but knew she needed a hook to pique the curiosity of her audience. "I thought, it's useless to talk about different ways to digest food. People would say, 'What do I f...ing care?' " she says, breaking into sonorous laughter. "But it is very interesting if you say sex of animals - everybody pricks up their ears."

The topic of animal reproduction, she says, is also poorly taught. As a Catholic schoolgirl in Italy, she found biology classes baffling: "They were so worried about our virginity that everything was an allegory, so I never understood any of it."

Although her beauty and background led her "obediently" to modelling and acting, it had been Rossellini's dream as a 14-year-old to make films about animals. Her wish back then, she says, would have been to work with National Geographic or David Attenborough.

When it came to producing her own, however, she recognised an essential difference in approach. "They're always very solemn or serious, it's never funny," she laments of nature documentaries. "Instead, animals make me laugh. I mean, when I read about biology, wherever I am, surrounded by animals, there's something very amusing about it ... and that's what I went for in my films."

To help ensure the work's scientific accuracy, Rossellini also decided to go back to university; first to New York University to complete her undergraduate studies and then to Hunter College, majoring in ethology (animal behaviour) and conservation. Rossellini says she is not the oldest in the class but is sometimes hindered by not having been educated in the US. "Oh my god, but there are moments that are very humiliating," she says.

The day before we meet, for instance, she had become unravelled by an algebra test question. "I went to the teacher and said, 'I can't read this, it's like Chinese or hieroglyphics.' " Her voice becomes very small. "I felt so ignorant. I came out of the school with tears."

The vigorous desire to try new things has also guided Rossellini's latest venture, developing the Green Porno films into a stage show at the suggestion of her close friend Carole Bouquet, the former Bond girl and face of Chanel No. 5 who facilitated an introduction to esteemed French screenwriter and playwright Jean-Claude Carrière. "I didn't know if I could write a monologue," says Rossellini. "But just the adventure of writing with Jean-Claude Carrière, I can't say no to that."

The show, also called Green Porno, will make its Australian premiere at the Adelaide Festival in March before playing Melbourne, Sydney, Perth and Brisbane. In the stage version, Rossellini appears as a lecturer at a scientific conference, with her short films woven throughout. "I have this bad back, so I couldn't really do anything acrobatic," she says, downplaying the scoliosis that laid her up for 18 months as a child and required her to have 13 vertebrae fused. "People say I'm regal," she once said. "But there's a reason for that - I can't bend!"

Rossellini was initially a little irritated that people were looking for reassurance about their own issues - homosexuality, gender ambiguity, polygamy, femininity - in the lives of animals. "If a worm is a hermaphrodite, does that allow me to change sex, too, if I want to?" she offers by way of example. "But the reaction was so strong about shaking the understanding of who we were, that [Carrière] said, 'We will embrace this and this will be what makes the difference with the film.' So the monologue addresses a lot of that."

Carrière also softened Rossellini's resistance to the grey areas beyond science. "I find the non- answer frustrating," she says, "but I understand that poetry lives in that alley where you don't see the exit, and Jean-Claude really added that to the monologue. You laugh but at the end you're left with, like ..." - she searches for a way to define the feeling - "like you're in a mysterious cloud."

Perhaps it is being European, she says, or being the daughter of a pioneering director, but she finds herself drawn as an actor to experimental film and the avant garde. She has submitted herself to direction by former partner David Lynch (including the disturbing erotic thriller Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart), theatre director Robert Wilson (The Days Before, based on an Umberto Eco text), as well as Maddin, who cast her as a amputee Canadian beer magnate in The Saddest Music in the World 10 years ago. "She'd shown nothing but wild adventurousness in her career, so I thought I stood a chance of tricking her into my cockamamie schemes," says Maddin.

"As an actor," says Rossellini, "the most interesting part is I always feel like I'm a tourist inside somebody's head."

Although she is still approached quite regularly for roles in Europe, her work in the American film industry has always been limited by her accent, and more recently her age. She is "thrilled", she says, that next year she will be eligible for the pension: "I don't even have to earn the little bit I have to earn now."

Fortunately, her years as a model before she went into acting provided long-lasting financial security. Rossellini modelled from the age of 28, gracing the cover of various editions of Vogue more than 20 times and representing Lancôme cosmetics for 14 years until she was controversially let go at 42, amid cries of ageism.

The shift to acting was financially disastrous, she admits, and she had not foreseen it. "But I'm not starving because I worked with Guy Maddin," she laughs. "He hasn't ruined me!"

In fact, she credits the initial shock of losing her modelling and endorsement income as a jolt that prompted a new venture, and career: "I thought, if there aren't [beauty lines aimed at older women] out there, why don't I try it?"

In 1995, she launched her own cosmetics line, Manifesto, which flourished for a decade, and later decided to apply the same attitude to eco-themed films. "Every film I made was about love and boy-meets-girl and man-meets-another-girl. It was basically the same story," she says. "But in my life, as I was growing older, I wasn't really so concerned about 'Do I find a husband? Is my husband staying with me?' I was in fact very concerned about the food we eat, the environment, and I couldn't see this reflected in the art."

Author Suzanne Levine, the founding editor of feminist magazine Ms, was one of the first people Rossellini showed her Green Porno films to. "She had such a strange reaction," Rossellini recalls. "She said to me, 'Only a woman of 50 can do this.' When you're young, you're always serious."

Rossellini's "light" treatment is not, however, to everyone's taste. In 2005, Maddin agreed to direct a 20-minute film Rossellini had written about her father, My Dad Is 100 Years Old. In it, Rossellini plays every role, including Federico Fellini, Charlie Chaplin, Alfred Hitchcock and her own mother. Her father is portrayed only as a large belly. The film was meant as a loving commemoration, timed for the centenary of her father's birth, but its release seriously strained the usually close relationship Rossellini shares with her twin sister Isotta, a professor of mediaeval literature.

Isotta went to the press. "In film festivals around the world, he is being remembered by this film, which is nothing to do with him," she said. "I cannot stay silent ... I think Father would be very upset to be represented like that."

"She thought it was offensive that I made my father a very big belly," says Rossellini. "I think she was offended that, inevitably in my films, I always want to make people laugh. She is very scholarly, but this is who I also am in person - always making jokes, always wanting to laugh."

Although Rossellini credits her father, who made many short science films himself, sometimes with her assistance, with fostering her curiosity about animal behaviour, she initially failed to recognise his legacy. "Actually, I always thought, 'I can only do this film because my dad is dead!' I mean, we're talking about sex! He wanted me to be a virgin forever, to be like the Virgin Mary, to give birth staying a virgin," she says. "In fact, sometimes when I did all this funny humping papier mâché animals, I was thinking, 'Oh, thank God my dad isn't around!' "

Says Maddin, "No matter how bold an allegorist she is as a filmmaker, or ingenious as a comedienne in her own work, she'll always be her daddy's little girl. A certain part of her [is] still a little astonished that her father Roberto left her so suddenly by dying in 1977."

Five years later, Rossellini's mother died, aged 67, after an eight-year battle with cancer. When planning a tribute for the centenary of Bergman's birth, in 2015, Rossellini decided to take a more conventional approach. The result is a 500-page book of images the family refer to as "Mama's Bible".

"Mama kept a very big archive of her life," says Rossellini. "All very orderly, very Swedish."

That resource, now housed at Wesleyan University, Connecticut, for use by film scholars, includes 6000 photographs, beginning in 1915 with snaps of her childhood taken by her photographer father, and ending in her 60s. "Because she was a star she had all these fantastic photographers, and then paparazzi," says Rossellini.

Already a huge star thanks to films such as Casablanca, the paparazzi's appetite for Bergman caught fire when she and Roberto Rossellini had an affair in 1949 while working on Stromboli, then had a child out of wedlock - Isabella's older brother, Roberto. Bergman was still married to Petter Lindstrom, with whom she had a daughter, Pia.

Bergman was denounced on the floor of the US Senate as an "apostle of degradation" and was not cast in another Hollywood film for seven years. The twins were born in 1952, but their parents were divorced by the time they were four, after which they were left primarily in the care of a nanny in Rome. "Father went to live with a new wife with other children, Mama went to live in Paris," Isotta told the New York Sun. "We saw Mama once in a while when she came to visit us, and Father we saw for lunch on Sunday."

Isabella grew up in Rome and Paris and moved to New York when she was 19 to work as a journalist and comedian for Italian television. She married film director Martin Scorsese in 1979 and divorced him in 1982, later marrying model turned Microsoft executive Jonathan Wiedemann, with whom she had daughter Elettra before they separated in 1986. She adopted a son as a single mother, in 1994, and named him Roberto after her father. Elettra is 30 and Roberto is 20.

After her daughter left home for college, Rossellini downsized to a smaller apartment. "It was me and my son in the evening; we would eat dinner in 10 minutes and then he would rush into his room so he could play video games or be on the phone with his friends. I would go in the living room and watch TV or read a book in my room and I just thought, 'This is really sad.' "

Rossellini had been vacationing on Long Island for decades, and when her son begged her to move to the country permanently, she acquiesced. "We loved it," she says.

Last year, Rossellini purchased nine hectares of land in nearby Brookhaven that had been earmarked for development and turned it over to a local lands trust. A few hectares are being used for organic farming and the remainder, for now, will stay as woodland. In addition to her conservation work, each year, Rossellini takes in a pregnant labrador or golden retriever, acts as midwife and then raises one of the puppies for a year for the Guide Dog Foundation. "I have many great memories out there, including learning to ride my bike and driving it straight into our pool and sinking to the bottom," Elettra told Women's Wear Daily magazine. "And also having to chase our pet pig, Spanky, off the golf course when he escaped from our garden."

Although both her children are settled back in the city, they share Rossellini's passion for the natural environment. Elettra works in fashion but has a degree in biomedicine from the London School of Economics, and has written a thesis on vertical farming. Roberto is studying at the International Center of Photography with the aim of becoming a wildlife photographer. The hybrid scientist-storyteller is clearly a family trait. "No matter how she thirsts, as her father did, for scientific knowledge, she'll always grasp that knowledge with the hands of a poet," says Maddin.

Rossellini has made plans to meet one of her old professors uptown and she mindfully turns out each of the lights as we exit the building. "In Europe, you're very confined culturally, so it feels a little bit like, 'Who am I to think I'm an artist and can do that?' " she reflects. "But on the other hand I just say, 'F... it', because in America that's how they go - they try it. If it works, it works. If it doesn't work, try again, but try something else."

And with that, she waves brightly and strikes off on foot in the direction of her lunch date, trailing her little suitcase.

Lead-in photograph by Zimmermann/H&K/Austral

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