June 6, 2004

Isabella Rossellini hailed a taxi near her Upper West Side apartment in New York on a busy spring day and was just settling into the back seat when the driver, like so many hacks before him, said, “You know, you look exactly like Ingrid Bergman.”

Yeah, yeah. The 51-year-old model, actress, mother of two and daughter of screen legend Ingrid Bergman hears that nearly every time she goes out in public, and she has learned just which responses the truth or a denial will inspire.

“I didn’t want to engage in conversation, so I just said, ‘Oh, really?” Rossellini recalls.

How times have changed. In 1949, when Bergman became pregnant with director Roberto Rossellini’s son while married to her first husband, Dr Peter Lindstrom, the very public brouhaha was so huge that paparazzi besieged the actress and continued to stalk her family throughout Isabella’s childhood. Bergman was drummed out of Hollywood. She returned six years later, winning her second best actress Oscar, but her career never quite recovered and, her daughter says, “It destroyed her.”

For her part, Rossellini conceived a child with the man who would become her second husband before she’d officially divorced Martin Scorsese, became the single mother of an adopted, mixed-race child and fashioned a crazy quilt of a career that’s still evolving, defying the expiration date invisibly stamped on the foreheads of professional beauties. Laura Dern, who has known Rossellini since they worked together on Blue Velvet in 1986, says, “She’s my hero. She’s easy, funny, free, open and the most grown-up person I know.” One era’s pariah is another’s role model.

Rossellini has always been unconventional, and at this stage of her life she is post-beauty, in attitude if not in fact. She began acting in 1979 and has chosen a wide range of roles, from Athena and Empress Josephine to an Italian Hasidic housewife. She can be seen as Lady Helen Port-Huntly, a beer baroness in Depression-era Winnipeg, Canada, in The Saddest Music in the World, a satiric, surrealistic black-and-white musical. In the season finale of ABC’s Alias, she made her third appearance as Katya Derevko, a tough-as-titanium colonel in the Russian secret service who is CIA agent Sydney Bristow’s long lost aunt. Until this year, she’d never acted on stage, but Rossellini just ended a four-month run off-Broadway in a pair of Terrence McNally one-act plays, The Stendahl Syndrome. In the first, she was a tour guide in Florence; in the second, the snooty wife of an orchestra conductor.

She could have been stuck in beautiful-women parts, but for every dream girl like Gabriella in Big Night, she’s chosen a grotesque as complex Perdita in Wild at Heart. Canadian director Guy Maddin, who conceived Lady Port-Huntly for Rossellini with co-screenwriter George Toles, describes The Saddest Music in the World with a wink as “an orgy of self-pity.”

When Maddin first spoke to her on the phone about being in his movie, he had been warned not to bring up her famous parents. “Within a minute we were talking about them and their place in history and how important they were to me,” he says. “It’s a subject that comes up continually. After we’d worked together she told me that my method of working reminded her of her father, which seems so unlikely, since he was an Italian neo-realist and I’m a Canadian fantasist.”

Yet Maddin and Roberto Rossellini, who died in 1977, are both defined as auteurs. “I’m very moved by film-makers who don’t get money from big film companies, who work with very small budgets but make ground-breaking films in their garage, in their backyard,” Rossellini says. “There is something very charming and handmade about what Guy Maddin does, like children’s collages or drawings. My dad was a very experimental director too.”

Time has been good to him. When he was alive, such Rossellini films as Stromboli and Open City were appreciated by the intelligentsia, but that kind of recognition didn’t facilitate finding money to make more films. “I grew up seeing my father very dashed, professionally,” Rossellini says. “Now that he’s been dead for years and doesn’t have the problem of making the next movie anymore, he’s appreciated as a great genius and is surviving so solidly in film archives.”

When they were small, Isabella, her fraternal twin sister Ingrid and brother Roberto lived on the outskirts of Paris, then in Rome. The children stayed in a separate apartment with the housekeeper, her son and a long parade of English, Swiss and German nannies, none of whom were around for long. The family led a bohemian life, scorched by scandal and inconvenienced by artistic poverty. When there was no money to pay the housekeeper, they moved into a smaller apartment together. When taxes weren’t paid, their furniture was confiscated.

“I went to see a therapist once, because everyone told me you have to do therapy, it’s the American way, and the therapist said, ‘Talk to me. Tell me about how your parents neglected you, how terrible it felt when the furniture was taken away.’ My parents didn’t neglect us,” Rossellini says. “We knew from the beginning we weren’t going to have money, so we had furniture we didn’t care about. When they took it away, they took it away, and we got some more at the flea market. We knew we were loved. My parents couldn’t care less about money. They were unconventional, so I suppose that is part of my heritage.”

In some ways, Rossellini admits she was extremely traditional as a young woman. She moved to New York at 18 to live with her half-sister, television journalist Pia Lindstrom, and worked as a reporter for Italian television. “I never thought I was going to work,” she says.

“I understood that my mother worked because she was kissed by the gods and she had to do it. It was a calling. I didn’t have that call. I belonged to a generation where women worked to entertain themselves, to make their lives more interesting. There was no sense of having a career.” At 27 she became Martin Scorsese’s third wife and thought she would work at something now and then, but her real career would be matrimony.

“Sometimes I wonder, ‘What was I thinking?’ The mentality was you married an interesting man, because an interesting man would provide you with an interesting life,” she says. “Marty, for sure, is the perfect husband for that. He’s an absolute genius. Fantastic mind. Great sense of humour, great sense of adventure. You could live just as Marty’s wife and have a fantastic life.”

The marriage ended after four years. “I was too naive and old-fashioned for Marty as a wife,” Rossellini says. “I wasn’t used to the roughness of American lifestyle. I wasn’t used to street life, to rock’n’roll. I was the naive girl from Europe, so it couldn’t have lasted.”

Rossellini had begun modelling during their marriage, and became involved with model Jonathan Weidemann after she and Scorsese separated. She obtained an instant divorce and marriage in one quick trip to Santo Domingo, mostly to please Weidemann’s family and to avoid running afoul of the morals clause in her contract with the international cosmetics company Lancome. She and Weidemann were married less than a year. She is still close to his family, and their daughter, Elettra, is 20.

“I’d grown up in Italy when divorce was forbidden,” Rossellini says. “When divorce is forbidden, there are a million escapades. It isn’t that people remain married in a conventional way — they have other stories. To me, marriage didn’t mean a relationship, it meant a document, like your passport or a visa. When people were scandalized that I was pregnant but wasn’t married to Jonathan, I said, ‘So what?”

Rossellini was no ordinary model. Her face appeared on the cover of American Vogue 28 times, and she was a favourite of Richard Avedon and other elite photographers. “When I started to model I made money on my own, and I understood the importance of having it, that I could buy an apartment and I could have a mortgage,” she says. She kept the lucrative Lancome contract for 14 years.

A professional collaboration with director David Lynch that began in 1985 led to a four-year relationship that he ended, leaving Rossellini “brokenhearted,” and in the mid-’90s she was engaged to actor-director Gary Oldman.

“I’m attracted to intelligence,” she says, “and if you’re highly intelligent, you can’t be conventional, because conventionality is limiting.”

By choice, the male in her life now is her 10-year-old son, Roberto. “I am a woman of order,” she says. “I’m very punctual, very organized. I stopped falling in love because I fall in love with so many men of disorder that it was impossible to go on like that. Also, I think that as you grow older, you fall in love less frequently. I have children and a family. I feel less the need for a companion, a boyfriend.”

Twelve years ago, when Lancome as much as told her she was over-the-hill, Rossellini thought it would all disappear — the work, the admiration. Yet she complains about being too busy, and turns down work that would take her away from her family. She doesn’t mourn her lost youth.

“I had so much satisfaction, the cover of Vogue, the big contract, that I feel like, let me try to live my life not as this beauty. I made it as a beauty, now I’m going to make it as an ugly, old person. Let’s see what happens. I’m sort of curious to see what will happen next. I don’t really think about it so much, you know?” —Dawn/The LAT/WP News Service.

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