Isabella Rossellini is the daughter of two film stars and a well-known actress herself. But she’s also had great success as a model – and she’s a role model for many women, fighting for the rights of the over-40s in advertising. But also for the rights of animals, for example with their “Green Porn”.
Again and again she is asked how it felt as the daughter of two such film celebrities. Of course, Isabella Rossellini always answers politely, talks about her mother, the cinema icon Ingrid Bergman (“Casablanca”), and her father, the Italian star director Roberto Rossellini. But actually, as a child, she never felt particularly good. And the daughter also emancipated herself very quickly, became a model and actress, herself a filmmaker, a pioneer for women in the advertising industry, an entrepreneur and finally even a farmer. On June 18, Rossellini will be 70 years old.
The Italian with US citizenship didn’t play in any big blockbusters. However, her role in David Lynch’s psychological thriller “Blue Velvet” as a nightclub singer and victim of a psychopath played by Dennis Hopper helped Rossellini gain cult status among fans.
As a child, adolescent and young woman, she was primarily “daughter of…”. Rossellini was born on June 18, 1952 in Rome and grew up in a large blended family – shortly after Isabella and her twin sister were born, her parents separated again and lived with other partners.
And Rossellini’s childhood was not as glamorous as expected. At the age of 13 she was operated on for a severe spinal curvature. “I had to lie quietly in bed for six months and then learn to walk again,” Rossellini recalled in an interview recently. Her mother wasn’t working at the time, and her father was “although charming, but financially a disaster”.
Because she had respect for her mother’s big footsteps, she first went to New York as a model and got prestigious jobs, for example for “Vogue”. A marriage with the great director Martin Scorsese failed, as did her relationship with director Lynch, with whom she also shot “Wild at Heart” after “Blue Velvet”. She has a daughter (Elettra) from her marriage to model Jonathan Wiedemann and adopted a son (Roberto) in the 90s.
In addition to her career as an actress, she became a pioneer for women in the advertising industry at the time when the French fashion group Lancôme did not renew her contract after a decade and a half. “They said: Women dream of staying young. You, at 42 or 43, can no longer represent this dream,” she recently told US presenter Charlie Rose. For Rossellini, it was “age racism,” as she once said. “Twenty-three years later, Lancôme called and said they had made a mistake.” Both are now working together again.
For Rossellini, beauty is “elegance and something that is in everyone”. In the film industry, the character actress tried her hand at heart projects, in front of and behind the camera. In the short film series and her directorial debut “Green Porno” she illuminates the sex life of animals in a bizarre way. She herself plays a snail, a spider man or even a bee in lovemaking.
A lifelong love of animals, she fulfilled “a little girl’s dream” ten years ago when she bought a farm near her home in the coastal town of Bellport, New York. Before that, at the age of 55 and after another back operation, she had enrolled in a university and studied zoology.
She says she finds more joy on her farm, with the animals, and harvesting fruit and vegetables with her nearby children and grandchildren than she does acting. Isabella Rossellini is also working on other film projects.
