SHE WAS BORN into cinema royalty, and set the screen on fire in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, but the world knows Isabella Rossellini best as the Lancôme lady. For 14 years between 1982 and 1996, the Italian actress was the face of Lancôme cosmetics, and she became so closely associated with the product, her acting and film-making career was neatly brushed aside.
Rossellini’s face may no longer smile down from billboards and department store displays all over the world, but she has kept busy making and acting in films, TV series and webisodes. So why haven’t we seen much of her in the cinema or on telly? Probably because the projects she works on are wilfully obscure and left-of-centre – hard to imagine RTÉ screening her educational series Green Porno, in which she dresses up as different animal species for each episode and acts out their mating rituals. Sounds like something David Lynch would make.
Rossellini’s acting career since Blue Velvet may not have set Hollywood on fire, but she had a lot to live up to. Her mother, Ingrid Bergman, was a bona fide screen legend, the star of such iconic films as Casablanca and Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious. When the actress – who was married to a Swedish dentist – began an affair with Italian director Roberto Rossellini in 1950, she caused a huge scandal in the US – even the Senate denounced her from Capitol Hill and TV host Ed Sullivan refused to have her on his show.
The couple had three children, Renato, Isabella and Isabella’s twin sister Isotta. As a teenager, Rossellini underwent several painful operations to correct her scoliosis, and at 19 went to study in New York, also doing some work as a presenter on Italian TV. After a photoshoot for Vogue, her modelling career took off, and the world’s top photographers, including Richard Avedon, Helmut Newton, Eve Arnold and Annie Liebowitz, were lining up to put her in their viewfinder. At the height of her success, she usually didn’t get out of bed for less than $9,000 (€6,781) a day. She married movie director Martin Scorsese in 1979 and settled in New York, but it was David Lynch who made her a film star, casting her as a sultry, damaged cabaret singer in Blue Velvet. She dated Lynch for five years, and also had role in his 1990 film Wild At Heart. When Lancôme dropped her unceremoniously because she was “too old”, she continued to be seen onscreen, but mostly in obscure, arty fare.
In 2011, she starred in Guy Maddin’s black-and-white gothic horror film Keyhole, which critics slammed as unfathomable. She has guested on such TV series as 30 Rock and Friends, and was the president of the jury at the 2011 Berlin Film Festival. She turned 60 recently, which nicely coincides with the release of her new movie, Late Bloomers, a coming-of-old-age comedy directed by Julie Gavras, the daughter of noted film director Costas Gavras, and co-starring William Hurt, Joanna Lumley and Simon Callow.
Kevin Courtney
