Entertainment

ISABELLA ROSSELLINI GOES INTO TRAINING TO PLAY A JEWISH MOTHER WEIGHTY CULTURAL BAGGAGE

ISABELLA Rossellini has done many things in many movies – but only in “Left Luggage,” opening next week, does she cry out, “Meshuga!”And if it seems crazy hearing Yiddish in that familiar, throaty voice – an echo of her mother, Ingrid Bergman’s, cinema’s Joan of Arc – well, Rossellini understands.

In fact, she told The Post, it’s why she initially refused the role.

“I told Jeroen [Krabbe], ‘The script is fantastic, but I think with a name like mine, Isabella Rossellini – which is so Italian, so Catholic – people would laugh.’

“A small film is so fragile. In a big film, you can make mistakes, because the marketing and shouting will cover them up. But a small film has to be perfect, otherwise it will die in two days.”

Perfect or not, “Left Luggage” is clearly a labor of love for Jeroen Krabbe, the Dutch actor (“The Fugitive,” “The Living Daylights”) who directed it and also plays the husband to Rossellini’s wife.

Like the character Chaja (Laura Fraser) – a young, liberal, disaffected Jew who becomes a nanny for Rossellini’s Hasidic family – Krabbe knew little about his roots. Only later in life did he learn that his mother was Jewish and her entire family was wiped out in the Holocaust.

Rossellini knew even less. Growing up in Rome and Paris, she received “a liberal Catholic education” that told her nothing about Jews, let alone Hasidic ones like Mrs. Kalman, the repressed mother of five whom she plays in “Left Luggage.”

But Krabbe, who’d starred with Rossellini in “Immortal Beloved” and four other films, was determined to cast her. He gave her movies to watch and books to read, and one of them – Pearl Abraham’s “The Romance Reader,” about a young Hasidic woman who surreptitiously reads romance novels – did the trick.

“I felt a sisterhood to Pearl,” says Rossellini. “You could understand how your culture is also your own corral, your boundary.”

With Krabbe’s urging, she called the writer and invited her to her Manhattan apartment for lunch.

“I wanted to make her feel comfortable, so I wore a skirt to my knee, a sweater,” recalls Rossellini, looking reed-thin in black slacks and blazer. “She must have felt the same way, because she came dressed in black leather!”

Finally, encouraged by what she saw as “the common denominator” between herself and the woman she’d be playing, Rossellini signed on.

Then reality set in.

She says she needed three dialect coaches – one to help her speak English with a northern European accent, another for Hebrew, a third for Yiddish – plus someone to correct her body language.

That, she says, was the trickiest:

“When the nanny is climbing out the window and Mrs. Kalman is upset, I clasped my hands together like this,” Rossellini says, her palms meeting in prayer position. “And everyone yelled, ‘Stop!'”

Jews, she explains, pray differently. In this scene, Mrs. Kalman simply buries her face in her hands.

“Even closing a book is different,” Rossellini says. “Because Hebrew is [written from] right to left, you close the book the opposite way. And when you enter a room, you touch like this” the mezuza.

One thing she felt entirely competent doing was her makeup, she says. The face that launched 500 magazine covers – and started a cosmetics line, after Lancome sidelined her at 42 – isn’t afraid to bare itself.

“I feel that when you play a role, you have to deliver yourself,” says the 48-year-old mother of two, her face luminous without lipstick.

“If you want to do beauty, do fashion!”