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Isabella Rossellini was the first arrival in a set of twin girls born in 1952 to Swedish actress Ingrid Bergman and Italian director Roberto Rossellini. After a childhood spent in Paris and Rome, she moved to New York at the age of 19 and became a translator and later a reporter for RAI-Italian Television, eventually leading to her appearances as the New York correspondent for the weekly Italian proto-Daily Show, the news parody program L’altra Domenica (The Other Sunday), with Roberto Benigni. She made her film debut with a brief cameo as a nun opposite her mother in the 1976 film A Matter of Time. However, she did not truly begin acting until the 1979 film Il prato (The Meadow), by the Taviani brothers, and even then, success was elusive until her first American film, Taylor Hackford’s White Nights (1985). She has gone on to act in a variety of films, primarily independent ones the world over, but is probably best known for her unforgettable role – for which she earned a 1987 Independent Spirit Award for Best Female Lead – as the abused nightclub singer Dorothy Vallens in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), opposite the equally memorable late Dennis Hopper.
Unfortunately, Ingrid Bergman, who passed away in 1982, did not live to witness her daughter’s ascendancy to indie film icon. Shortly before her mother died, Ms. Rossellini’s modeling career skyrocketed. One of the world’s great natural beauties (bearing a striking resemblance to her mother), she worked, during her decade-plus stint as a model, with the industry’s most respected photographers – Bruce Weber, Bill King, Richard Avedon, Helmut Newton, Eve Arnold, Annie Leibovitz, among others – and appeared on the cover of the world’s top fashion magazines, Vogue, Elle, Marie Claire, Harper’s Bazaar, and Vanity Fair. In March 1988, an exhibition of photographs solely of Ms. Rossellini, entitled Portrait of a Woman, was on display at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris. Her face was already familiar to many as the official spokesperson for Lancôme; during her 14-year tenure, she helped to launch the perfume Tresor. After her association with Lancôme abruptly ended, she remained in the cosmetics business and developed her own fragrance, Manifesto.
A Renaissance woman, Ms. Rossellini has also appeared on television in series (ABC’s Alias, NBC’s 30 Rock, Fox’s The Tracey Ullman Show, and CBS’s Chicago Hope, for which she received an Emmy nomination), miniseries (Homer’s The Odyssey, Merlin, Don Quixote, Napoleon, and Earthsea) and TV movies (Monte Walsh and Crime of the Century, for which she received a Golden Globe nomination). She made her American-stage debut in the 2004 Off Broadway production of Terrence McNally’s The Stendhal Syndrome.
Her directorial debut was the comic short film Oh La La. Ms. Rossellini then delighted film festival, Sundance Channel and cell phone audiences with a series of whimsical short films called Green Porno, which she wrote, directed and starred, dressed up on screen in colorful costumes as various bugs and insects to illustrate their mating rituals. This interest in the natural world extends to real-life activism. She is very involved in the Wildlife Conservation Network and the Howard Gilman Foundation, as well as a volunteer for the Guide Dog Foundation.
Cinephiles also appreciated My Dad Is 100 Years Old, the affectionate tribute to her father she created in collaboration with Canadian cult-film director Guy Maddin in which Roberto Rossellini appears as a talking belly to debate with Fellini, Hitchcock, and Selznick about what film’s main goal should be. She also wrote a book about her father entitled In the Name of the Father, the Daughter and the Holy Spirits: Remembering Roberto Rossellini. This publication joins her other books, the photographic compilation Looking at Me and the “fictional memoir” Some of Me. In 1997, the George Eastman House honored Ms. Rossellini for her work in preserving the films of her parents.
SELECT FILMOGRAPHY
2009 My Dog Tulip (voice)
2008 Two Lovers
2008 Green Porno
2008 The Accidental Husband
2006 Brand Upon the Brain! (narrator)
2006 The Architect
2005 The Feast of the Goat
2004 The Tulse Luper Suitcase, Part 2: Vaux to the Sea
2004 The Saddest Music in the World
2003 The Tulse Luper Suitcase, Part 1: The Moab Story
2002 Roger Dodger
1998 The Impostors
1998 Left Luggage
1996 Big Night
1996 The Funeral
1994 Wyatt Earp
1994 Immortal Beloved
1993 Fearless
1992 Death Becomes Her
1990 Wild at Heart
1989 Cousins
1986 Blue Velvet
1985 White Nights
1979 Il prato
1976 A Matter of Time
