Fresh from a book-signing packed with camera-toting fans at Marshall Field’s, Isabella Rossellini is laughing, a cascading contralto uncannily reminiscent of her famous mother, Ingrid Bergman.
“Some of the people thought I was a channeler or a clairvoyant and that amused me incredibly,” Rossellini says. “I was really ready to play along and say, `Yes, yes, I can hear them.’ “
Perhaps her fans had only read the copy on the jacket of “Some of Me” (Random House), Rossellini’s whimsical take on autobiography and a memoir that includes imaginary dialogues with Bergman and her father, director Roberto Rossellini. (Her parents’ adulterous romance in 1949 was an international scandal and led to Bergman’s fall from professional grace in Hollywood.)
Or perhaps it was confusion over Rossellini’s provocative announcement at the beginning of the book that the reader should “not expect confessions, revelations, not even the truth. . . . I lie. I always did.”
“Some people asked me seriously if I was channeling or if it was my spirituality or religion,” Rossellini continues. “It didn’t even occur to me that this would be a question.”
Rossellini is also perplexed when a reporter asks about a passing — and somewhat shocking — mention in the book that she was once date-raped and beaten.
“I was trying to give an example about how you can use something that happened to you in preparing for a role,” Rossellini says.
The role under discussion, of course, is Dorothy Vallens, the tortured woman in “Blue Velvet,” the controversial film directed by Rossellini’s former companion, David Lynch.
“I read in the script that she was banging her head against the wall and occasionally she would ask people to hit her.
“I was wondering why she would do that. The only experience I had was with a beating. With the first blow I just saw darkness with this light. I didn’t feel pain. I didn’t feel fear. I don’t think I attempted to escape. I just was bewildered. I don’t remember anything but that blackness and light.
“So I thought that Dorothy Vallens was a mad woman, incredibly anxious, and when the anxiety in her would rise to the point that she couldn’t tolerate she would hit her head, so that maybe like me she would see blackness and stars and maybe she could relax.
“I didn’t write it to titillate people. I just assumed that every woman, to a certain extent, would understand it. For a woman there is always that feeling of lurking threat.”
Model of maturity
Women do relate to Rossellini, whether they have tender feelings towards her because of her mother or are attracted by her own work in film and her 14 years as a model-spokeswoman for Lancome, the French cosmetics company.
Rossellini started modeling at 28, an age when many models retire. Posing for a fashion photographer as a favor to a friend led to an appearance on the cover of the American edition of Vogue in March 1982.
She appeared on the covers of many top fashion magazines after that, then signed a lucrative contract with Lancome to publicize its cosmetics and fragrances.
Five years ago, when Rossellini turned 40, Lancome executives offered her a chance to bow out gracefully. She refused, offering, among other things, to share the campaign with someone younger.
“When Lancome (did) let me go, people stopped me in the street and said Lancome made a mistake,” says Rossellini, 45, who looks luminous even with minimal make-up and a not particularly glamorous green silk pantsuit.
“It’s not that Lancome was the first (cosmetic company to fire an older model), but people resented it. By keeping me until I was 42, (Lancome) raised people’s hopes.
“I argued with Lancome, but I didn’t argue that people don’t want to look younger and that’s a dream, but there’s a resentment that comes with it and how do you solve that?
“I don’t know that the dream of being young means being young and wrinkleless. If you decode what it means to be young, does it mean to have energy and freedom more than perfect skin? Take Tina Turner. She is not young and yet she has a young audience who don’t even think of her age. What did she do that is so successful — she probably didn’t do it purposely — it’s just her energy, a vitality. I think that’s what we’re looking for.”
Rossellini doesn’t like the notion of “eternal youth” and believes Europeans deal with aging better than Americans do. She says she’s “happy” for the technical advances in plastic surgery, “yet it is used like feetbinding in China.”
“Feetbinding,” she says, “was a symbol of great aristocracy and women not needing to do housework, and, meanwhile, these poor women were tortured and having pain beyond belief and yet they wanted their feet to be like that.
“That’s the same thing with us and plastic surgery. Even with the negative publicity about silicone breast implants, people take the risk and live with the anxiety.”
Warming to her subject, Rossellini vehemently says, “A make-up artist was talking to me about somebody else who was older and didn’t have plastic surgery. She (the make-up artist) was despising the woman as somebody who was kind of impolite. Like you were dressed slovenly and not with any style, in a way that would be insulting to people who came in contact with you.
“To do plastic surgery for politeness, that is too much! Yet that’s where it’s going, I think. The well-presented woman would have the courtesy not to show her neck hanging.”
A lifelong learner
One gets the impression that Rossellini learns lessons from every experience she has had in a complicated life, which included growing up in Paris and Rome with a twin sister and older brother; a two-and-a-half year marriage to director Martin Scorsese; and another short marriage, this one to Jonathan Wiedemann, the father of her daughter, Elettra, now 14. As a single parent, Rossellini adopted a son, Roberto, now 3.
And there were romances with Lynch and Gary Oldman. Rossellini’s current beau is theatrical director Gregory Mosher, formerly of Chicago’s Goodman Theatre and Lincoln Center.
She hasn’t forsaken acting. Besides “Blue Velvet,” her movie credits include “White Nights,” “Cousins,” “Wild at Heart” and “Immortal Beloved.”
But most recently she has appeared on television. A brief appearance as herself in “Friends” led to roles in “Crime of the Century” for HBO, “The Odyssey” for NBC and two episodes of the series “Chicago Hope,” featuring an adoption story which Rossellini helped write.
She thinks about directing a film, but doesn’t know if she will ever do it.
“I think I started to act because I thought it would give me knowledge in how to direct. Then I found that I liked acting more than I thought I would, so I did more of it.”
Maybe it’s in her blood.
“Maybe it is,” she says, laughing that throaty contralto.
“Probably.”
