Isabella rossellini bellport
How Isabella Rossellini Turned A Dilapidated Long Island Barn Into An Animal-Filled Country Retreat
Isabella Rossellini found Bellport – the unpretentious little sister of the Hamptons on the south shore of Long Island – in 1982, one of the most tumultuous years of her life. It was marked by triumph and tragedy: she signed an exclusive deal with Lancôme to become, at the time, the world’s highest-paid model; she lost her mother, the mesmeric Swedish actor Ingrid Bergman, to cancer; and, not insignificantly, discovered the place she now calls home. It’s little wonder that the model, actor, filmmaker, writer – and latterly farmer – should be drawn to its scaled-down intimacy, which is reminiscent of the villages of her childhood.
The guest house is one of a handful of buildings over the six-acre site
Francesco Lagnese
Read more: 9 Interior Design Trends To Note For The Year Ahead
“It’s such a lovely, warm community,” she says. “Downtown is just a few blocks long; it has this very European feel.” What began with the occasional visit – taking the short train ride from her Manhattan loft – evolved into something more permanent. Rossellini rented a cottage for the summer, then bought a retreat in East Patchogue. The longer she stayed, the less she missed Manhattan. “That’s how it started,” she says. It was close to two decades later, while biking around the village, that she stumbled upon a dead-end road that led to a series of farm buildings.
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“I noticed this very beautiful, big red barn. It reminded me straight away of Sweden,” says Rossellini. “As soon as I saw it, I loved it.” The site was for sale – with a snag. Developers had earmarked it for demolition, but Rossellini intervened, negotiating to save her beloved barn and its accompanying cottage. She never looked back. “It’s not enormous; but you feel privacy,” she says of her six acres, encircled by maple trees.
“I always wanted a house that’s secluded, yet connected. From here, I can walk right into the village.”
From circus posters and hammocks to a film-prop chandelier, curiosities dot the vast living space
Francesco Lagnese
There was still much work to be done. Originally built in 1850, the barn was in a serious state of disrepair. The dirt floor was collapsing, and there was no heating or insulation. “It had been used as a place to keep animals – and for parties,” she says of the previous owners. After an introduction by a mutual friend, Rossellini brought in Pietro Cicognani, an architect known for his playful yet classical sensibility. Drawn together by their Roman roots, the pair, who remain close friends, set to work reconfiguring the guest accommodation and structurally stabilising the barn, which was to become her main residence, and a playroom for her now grown-up children – the model Roberto Rossellini and food writer Elettra Rossellini Wiedemann.
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Rossellini’s bedroom, located in what was once the hayloft
Francesco Lagnese
The project was forged using largely local reclaimed materials. Cicognani employed the original exterior boards to insulate the interior, painting the outer shell a deep red hue. A small bank of windows was installed, including a glass wall inside the veranda entrance, accessed by a wide, slatted gangplank, where Rossellini enjoys her morning cappuccino. “We maintained the roughly hewn look, but made it a functioning house,” she says, on what Cicognani affectionately refers to as keeping its “barn-ness”.
Rossellini had planned to add a pool in the basement. Instead, Cicognani convinced her to create a third, Dutch-style structure, with a coolly geometric interior that’s swathed in cement to house the pool and gym where Rossellini spends an hour each morning. It was a transformative move. “The houses are placed in a way that feels like a piazza,” she says.
“It’s completely Italian, but with these Swedish style barns – it’s perfect for me.” Now, the basement of the barn comprises a bedroom, bathroom, minuscule kitchen (“I eat very little – if I have a party, we use the kitchen in the guest house to prepare the food,” she says) with a small dining room, clad in reclaimed white wood walls with matching painted brick floors, and a garage. Above, is the cavernous living space, with two towering upper mezzanines where, in what was once the hayloft, Rossellini has a library, her own sleeping quarters and a copper-floored bathroom that’s plumbed from a single, central column.
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Isabella with her “mutts”
Francesco Lagnese
“There’s a certain humour and humility to the whole place,” says Cicognani of the project. There were no mood boards, just a collaborative, creative approach. In lieu of stairs, for instance, there are industrial railings.
“It was less about an aesthetic than a way of being. She simply had in mind a very elegant and spartan way of living.” Rossellini’s appetite for design came as something of a surprise, even to her. “I think it’s the same gesture as fashion – putting on clothes or make-up is like decorating,” she says. “To me, it’s the same eye.”
The real beauty of the barn is in its monumental scale. A natural minimalist, Rossellini has consciously tried to keep the 35ft-long space relatively unadorned. “It’s actually very difficult to decorate; and it’s the incredible dimensions that make the house. If you furnish it too much, it just detracts from that,” says Rossellini, who favours simple sofas, and director’s chairs and tables that can be folded away when not in use. Over the years, her attempts at decorative sparsity have often been thwarted. “Everyone gives me furniture thinking that my home is empty and that I’ll be pleased. I’m never pleased, because I like it empty,” she says with a laugh.
Much of her furniture is inherited from her late mother; as are many of the photography books that line the shelves. At the entrance, stands a palatial dining table made, decorated and donated by her half-sister, Pia Lindström, and her two sons. “It’s beautiful, but enormous,” she says pointedly.
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A photograph of Ingrid Bergman, Rossellini’s mother
Francesco Lagnese
The tall walls and low shelves are decked with photographs of the Rossellini clan, including her late father Roberto, the neo-realist Italian director with whom Bergman fell in love while a married mother, much to the shocked chagrin of Hollywood. “There were lots of pictures of me by photographers who were friends,” says Rossellini of portraits by Cecil Beaton and Henri Cartier-Bresson. “People just thought I was vain, so I donated many of them to my mother’s archive [The Ingrid Bergman Cinema Archive]. But in fact, when I looked at the pictures, I thought of the photographer.
”
A Dutch-style barn was built to house the pool
Francesco Lagnese
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Rossellini’s home remains an eclectic record of an extraordinary life: there are film posters celebrating her parents’ prolific cinematic careers; the animation cells she collects by Chuck Jones; oil paintings and photographs by David Lynch, the director for whom she was a lover and muse following her marriages to Martin Scorsese and Jonathan Weidemann, the former model and Microsoft creative director. Sadly, the remnants of her electrifying turn in Lynch’s Blue Velvet in 1986 have long since disappeared. “My original velvet robe was borrowed by a friend for a Halloween fancy dress party and never returned,” she says.“And my cat shat on the wig. I had to throw it away.” Artwork from Link Link Circus, Rossellini’s recent one-woman touring theatrical show, is also on display, alongside circus banners and custom-made acrobat circus netting that fills the gaps in the upper mezzanine floors.
One of the most striking features of Rossellini’s home is the fluidity between outside and in. Every time she goes to swim or cook or sleep, she steps outdoors. Rossellini starts her day at dawn by checking on her animals. The current inventory stands at 150 chickens, 20 ducks (“they’re funny and nice and make wonderful eggs, but they’re a little messy”), six turkeys (“beautiful, but brutal fighters”), honeybees, a pair of kunekune pigs, and her mutts Pinocchio and Morsi. A mile away in Brookhaven is the 28-acre, organic, community-led, seasonal farm that Rossellini founded in 2013. The farm, where her daughter is an executive director, produces enough honey and vegetables to supply scores of local families. “Rather than build a tennis court, I thought I’d have a farm,” she says. “I didn’t realise the incredible impact it would have on the community. People want to eat the fresh vegetables; they want to take their children to see how the carrots grow and to caress baby lambs.”
The copper-floored bathroom
Francesco Lagnese
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Rossellini is happiest when immersed in a project.
Now 68, her mind is turning to the farm’s enduring economic sustainability. She and Cicognani are in the throes of creating a three-roomed bed and breakfast on site, fashioned in the same spartan style as her home and set to open next summer. She’s also nurturing a small herd of rare breed sheep, so that fashion students can experience the diversity of their wools first-hand. “Sometimes my plans may look a bit eccentric,” she says, before adding defiantly, “but should I not do things just so I don’t upset the people who want me to simply stand still and look beautiful?” Those who dare to argue will have her, and her exotically plumed chickens, to deal with.
Order Pietro Cicognani: Architecture & Design, out this month, to see more photographs of Cicognani’s stunning renovations.
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Vogue RecommendsIsabella Rossellini's house: the actress' Long Island barn
(Image credit: Photographs/ Franceso Lagnese)
Home invasions by animals are a common occurrence for Isabella Rossellini, from bats and raccoons to her own heritage breeds.
‘The sheep have two acres but I sometimes let them graze in the piazza and they like to stampede into the house,’ she says.
The ‘piazza’ the model and actress-turned-farmer refers to is the grassy square at the center of her three-barn dwelling in Bellport, Long Island, which she restored alongside her great friend, the architect Pietro Cicognani, and which she recently revealed to H&G.
Isabella’s home is among 18 of Pietro’s projects – some of the world's best homes – featured in his new book, Pietro Cicognani Architecture and Design . The pair met more than 25 years ago through mutual friends and when Isabella hired him to renovate her dilapidated barn, a beautiful working relationship blossomed.
‘Creatively, we get on very well and both make daring choices,’ Pietro says.
‘When I worked with other architects, there was this incredible preoccupation with where the main bedroom, bathroom or dining room was going to go,’ Isabella adds.
‘But having previously lived in a loft for many years, I knew that it’s the space that creates your lifestyle. This is a quirky and original project, so I wanted to work with somebody who would understand the playfulness of it.’
Entrance
(Image credit: Photographs/ Franceso Lagnese)
Flowers spilling from ceramic pots enliven the porch, which doubles as a sun terrace with directors’ chairs for flexible seating.
Positioned around the piazza, the formation and the color of the buildings evoke a sense of familiarity. ‘When Pietro created this feature, I immediately felt at home because it is so Italian, but also because I’m half Swedish and the red color of the buildings reminds me of Sweden.’
Living area
(Image credit: Photographs/ Franceso Lagnese)
Isabella first encountered this hidden rural corner on a bike ride. Dating back to the 1830s, the building had originally provided sustenance for the small whaling town and Isabella seized the opportunity to restore it.
Unperturbed by the volume of the 35-foot- long barn, she uses the lower floor as a living area.
And this area is packed with original and intriguing living room ideas personal to its owner. Woven among black-and-white family photographs and film stills is Isabella’s quixotic collection of art and curios, where the animal kingdom and the bright world of the circus dominate. ‘I don’t have enough money to buy Picassos, but I do buy things that refer to animals,’ she says, joyfully showing off a large banner of a snake charmer.
A rearing horse from a movie set makes a fantastic focal point; it stands on a plywood floor that is painted to look like a rug.
(Image credit: Photographs/ Franceso Lagnese)
A collection of books and framed photographs is informally displayed along a low wooden shelving unit lining the wall.
Stairs
(Image credit: Photographs/ Franceso Lagnese)
Isabella set up sleeping quarters in the hayloft. Pietro sourced this vintage set of aeroplane steps to access the hayloft.
Bedroom
(Image credit: Photographs/ Franceso Lagnese)
The large windows in Isabella’s hayloft sleeping space bring in plenty of light and offer verdant views, with simple muslin curtains for privacy.
‘The largest barn is where Isabella makes a lot of movie and theater pieces, so it’s like a creative laboratory that she happens to sleep inside,’ says Pietro.
Bathroom
(Image credit: Photographs/ Franceso Lagnese)
A copper floor seals the bathroom from leaks, ageing with a patina that reminds Pietro of leather.
The cottage has become the kitchen and dining room with a guest bedroom and bathroom, and Pietro designed and built the third barn to house a pool and sauna.
A graduate in animal behavior, and now running a 30-acre farm a mile from her home, Isabella says the needs of the animals are the fabric of her life – rising early to tend to them, rearing chicks and teaching her fashion protégés about the value of wool.
‘I’ve dreamt of living like this since I was a little girl, so I had to do it before I died,’ she says, as one of her dogs jumps onto her lap and fixes her with an adoring gaze.
Text / Juliet Benning
Photography / Francesco Lagnese
Interiors have always been Vivienne's passion – from bold and bright to Scandi white. After studying at Leeds University, she worked at the Financial Times, before moving to Radio Times. She did an interior design course and then worked for Homes & Gardens, Country Living and House Beautiful. Vivienne’s always enjoyed reader homes and loves to spot a house she knows is perfect for a magazine (she has even knocked on the doors of houses with curb appeal!), so she became a houses editor, commissioning reader homes, writing features and styling and art directing photo shoots. She worked on Country Homes & Interiors for 15 years, before returning to Homes & Gardens as houses editor four years ago.
A Man Not From Here
AST publishes a biography of David Lynch by Dennis Lim, in which the author traces the life and work of the director, from studying painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts to his passion for transcendental meditation and the creation of the "Inland Empire".
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In the time between making Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, Lynch became an established public figure—an unexpected turn of events for a director once associated with the midnight filmmaking circle and then one of the biggest flops in history Hollywood. An affair with an actress and a supermodel automatically made him interesting to the press. Hollywood photographers have immortalized his relationship with Isabella Rossellini in poses that inevitably look Lynchian. In one Helmut Newton portrait of the couple, both tender and disturbing, Rossellini has her eyes closed and her face turned up at an angle; Lynch, with his signature forelock and half-concealed face, keeps his hand on his beloved's neck, ready either to kiss her, or to do something sinister.
In a more playful shot by Annie Leibovitz, who helped cement Lynch's status as America's most beloved eccentric genius of the era, Rossellini, wearing a halter-dropped dress, hugs Lynch with one arm, wearing a black turtleneck whose throat almost completely covers his face. nine0003
During the five years that Rossellini and Lynch were together, they lived at different ends of the country. "I don't know what he's doing in Los Angeles," she told a Vanity Fair reporter in 1987, a year after they began their relationship. But Lynch often visited her in Manhattan and her country house on Long Island, in the resort town of Bellport. The deadpan, telegenic Rossellini contributed to Lynch's image by discussing their work together with journalists. She scolded him for his silence during couples interviews ("David, you're too mysterious right now"), called him "a peaceful, calm, very nice person", and also said that he laughed hysterically throughout Frank's brutal sex scene with Dorothy in "Blue Velvet": "David is obsessed.
She seems unbearably funny to him.” Giving one of the most accurate descriptions of Lynch, she speaks of him as "a man who lives a fairly simple life, so that he does not have to think about it too much - so that he can just sit and follow his visions." Lynch broke up with Rossellini at 1991, leaving her "heartbroken," as she writes in her 1997 memoir A Little About Me. In this book, she speaks of him with love, but also reinforces his image of a distant genius: “From the glazing that often came over his eyes, I always understood that he was not listening to me. I suspect he is in other dimensions."
Lynch essays since Twin Peaks have focused on insecurities and oddities. Michael Ontkin, who played the Sheriff on the show, told Rolling Stone how one day, just as they were about to turn on the camera, Lynch reached into his pocket and pulled out "an ear out of Blue Velvet." Lynch corrected the journalist: it was the other ear. Someone sent it to him, "and it so happened that it ended up in my pocket.
" Another repeated story is that Lynch has a formalized uterus on his desk. This, as it turned out, was a gift from Raffaella De Laurentiis: she had an operation to remove her uterus, and she decided that Lynch would appreciate such a gift. (For twenty years he was still answering questions about the uterus: “It has never been on my desk,” he says in 2007. “It is somewhere in the house.”)
If journalists weren't focusing on Lynch's supposed weirdness, they were turning to his weird normality. As if adopting his own method, they tapped the façade of meekness in the hope of finding a perverted underside. A typical narrative went like this: Lynch is a man of habit, enjoying the simple pleasures of life, although his habits are so obsessive that they border on pathology. He told Jay Leno on The Tonight Show that for seven consecutive years he drank a chocolate milkshake in a silver glass every day at 2:30 pm at the Bobs Big Boy Cafe in Los Angeles. He also reported that he often ate the same thing every day (at the time it was a tuna sandwich) until he got bored and switched to something new.
(In late 2001, when another journalist decided to inquire about his diet, he switched to "lettuce run through Quizinart"*, so everything tastes the same.") But cooking at home was strictly forbidden: "The smell of food - when paintings or even records are worth you - this smell is absorbed into all my work. So I eat food that does not require turning on the stove to cook. "His house in the Hollywood Hills looked spartan, almost empty. This was before he started making his own tables, chairs, and lamps, and since he rarely found furniture he liked, he left the house unfurnished: "I like the feeling of a real, unoccupied space. I love the way the Japanese live."
Blue Velvet was supposed to give Lynch new opportunities, but project after project fell apart, largely due to the financial troubles of his former patron, Dino De Laurentiis. But he found something to do in other areas. Thanks to Rossellini, he met Leo Castelli, at that time the most influential art dealer in the country.
Castelli was impressed by Lynch's paintings. "He knows what he's doing," he told Vanity Fair, and added, "I'd like to know how he got to this; he was not born from the head of Zeus." February 19In 1989, to the consternation of the New York art establishment, Castelli honored Lynch with a solo exhibition at his gallery in Soho (“The age of amateurs has arrived,” one observer quipped, lamenting the paintings’ “tortured naivety”). About a year before Twin Peaks hit the screens, Lynch starred opposite Rossellini in Tina Rathbourne's indie drama Zelly and Me, which will direct several episodes of Twin Peaks in the future; he filmed several atmospheric commercials for the Calvin Klein Obsession perfume, continued to draw the comic "The Angriest Dog in the World" weekly for the "L.A. Reader"; also staged the avant-garde musical Industrial Symphony No. 1 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, featuring a dwarf sawing wood, flying puppets, lots of smoke and fog, Twin Peaks music by Angelo Badalamenti murmuring in the mouth of Julie Cruz singing from the trunk of a car, and projections of scenes with Laura Dern and Nicolas Cage from the just-filmed film Wild at Heart.
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"Eraserhead" and "Blue Velvet" took shape due to the long incubation period; It is symbolic that "Wild at Heart" appeared almost in the blink of an eye. Road movie is a genre created for speed. Lynch read the original novel by Bay Area writer Barry Gifford** while he was still in the editing stage. Monty Montgomery, one of the producers of Twin Peaks (he will play a cowboy in Mulholland Drive), brought the book to Lynch because he wanted to make a movie of it himself and make Lynch an executive producer. But when Lynch fell in love with GIFFORD noir in the crazy atmosphere of southern gothic, Montgomery gave him the director's chair, agreeing to the role of producer. Lynch wrote the script in exactly six days. Film production began on August 1989 years old, two months after funding was secured, and it was finished nine months later, just a few days before the start of the Cannes Film Festival; Lynch flew to France with the film under the seat.
In Gifford's seven-volume saga of six decades in the lives of Sailor Ripley and Lula Paice Fortune, the couple, as has already happened with a myriad of outlaw lovers, find themselves on the run from justice and Lula's overbearing mother, Marietta.
“The whole world is wild at heart, and also crazy,” Lula declares at the beginning of their eventful odyssey with sharp turns and digressions, which are more than enough to confirm her thesis. Adapting Dune for film, with its miles of plot to recap, was a heavenly punishment for Lynch. But Gifford's lively, imaginative prose and free presentation of the plot were perfectly combined with his interests and skills. He was drawn to the mood swings and the hellish mixture of genres, and decided to highlight the book's contrasts: "I just made the highlights a little brighter and the dark stuff a little darker," he told Premier magazine. nine0003
He left many of Gifford's quotes, but made up backstories, distorted some characters (Marietta becomes a real monster, a witch), wove a murky crime syndicate plot into the story and fastened a happy ending (with Gifford's permission; the writer assured Lynch that Sailor and Lula will be together again in due time). The most unpleasant and cruel scenes - the murder that Sailor commits with his bare hands and for which he is sent to prison, the death of one of the characters during a certain voodoo ritual, the verbal rape of Lula by the scoundrel Bobby Peru - are either omitted in the book or even invented by Lynch.
Gifford compared his lovers to Romeo and Juliet, but Lynch overlaid their story with his own mythology, borrowed from the pop culture icons of his youth. The film's promotional slogan sums it all up perfectly: "Elvis and Marilyn on their way to Oz." nine0003
"Wild at Heart" with good and evil witches and references to Toto and the Yellow Brick Road is a clear homage to Lynch's favorite film, The Wizard of Oz, a road movie before the term was coined. This thoroughly American genre is closely related to the growth of the auto industry, having been shaped by the noirs and detective films of the post-war era, and flourished with the creation of the interstate highway system and the subsequent growth in the number of car owners in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The films that defined it, Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider and Monte Hellman's Two-Lane Highway, are products of the counterculture as well as relics of it. As the genre evolved (and Wild at Heart became part of an era when American cinema was obsessed with wanderlust, as seen in films as varied as Stranger Than Paradise, Raising Arizona, My Own Private Idaho) and "Thelma and Louise") this romance with the road remained ambiguous.
A strip of asphalt stretching towards a vanishing point on the horizon can mean anything: freedom, loneliness, obsession, loss, fate. nine0003
For Lynch, who often returns to the hypnotic image of the yellow median in his films, the road, as he said to Rodley, is "moving towards the unknown." Road movies also often depict the "American wilderness", the settlements of society and the back roads of civilization. Lula (Laura Dern) and Sailor (Nicolas Cage) from Wild at Heart set out on a road trip from Cape Fear, North Carolina in the Ford Thunderbird to California, Oz's must-have, but end up stuck in Big Tune's Texas hole. (Their journey, which begins near the location where Blue Velvet was filmed, follows Lynch's own trajectory and its creative outcome - a transition to films set in Los Angeles.) On the road from somewhere or somewhere, determined by the starting point point or destination, road movie protagonists always find something, whether it's what they're looking for or not: a sense of self or an idea of America.
Lynch believes that Gifford's novel captured the mood of the country, a time when "madness was in the air". As it swings from one violent scene to the next, the film magnetizes all that air of 'madness', much like a car radio irritating Lulu, who turns the wheel and turns and hears only bad news. nine0003
If Blue Velvet is a mind-controlled film about a series of uncontrollable urges, then Wild at Heart is an unrestrained work of the subconscious. It's probably no coincidence that it was filmed during that short period in Lynch's career, at the peak of the Twin Peaks craze, when he could really do whatever he wanted. There is a feeling that "Wild at Heart" was conceived from the very beginning as the exact opposite of "Blue Velvet". Nervous and scattered in space, unlike its closed and claustrophobic predecessor, it begins with a close-up of a lit match and is constantly on the verge of an explosion. If the sex in Blue Velvet (and most of Lynch's films, for that matter) is riddled with guilt and horror, then Wild at Heart is Lynch's most romantic film to date, aside from Mulholland Drive, so close as suitable as possible to the glorification of the energy of the libido.
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Because of her character in Blue Velvet, Laura Dern was getting cast as good girls all the time, and it took a lot of faith and imagination for Lynch to play the drawling, twitchy, all the time excited and tense Lulu. "He's talking about gum or cigarettes and I already know what to do," Dern told a Premier reporter when he was on set. (Dern and Cage became a couple in real life, as did her and McLachlan after Blue Velvet.) Lynch also cast Dern's mother, Diane Ladd, as Marietta. The rest of the supporting roles are mostly a cameo film, piecemeal to the point of almost falling apart, running a carousel of sinister cartoon characters in front of Lula and Sailor, played by Isabella Rossellini in a white wig, Willem Dafoe, Crispin Glover, Grace Zabrisky and Harry Dean Stanton. nine0003
Wild at Heart is Lynch's first full-fledged comedy, but despite its prevailing tone of aggressive absurdity, it also features some of the most heartbreaking scenes in his oeuvre.
In the most famous of them, Bobby Peru, played by Defoe, comes to Lula's motel room and sees evidence of toxicosis in the form of vomit on the carpet. Lynchian synesthesia usually combines visual images with auditory ones; here he connects the sense of smell. After a close-up on the smell of her stale vomit that opens the scene, Bobby pulls Lulu towards him and, baring his rotten teeth, demands, "Say 'fuck me'." He repeats his dirty mantra until finally Lula's disgust turns into arousal and she does not; then he takes a step back: "Someday I will, baby." This scene leaves viewers feeling as if they were made part of, even used like Lulu, as we witnessed a verbal rape that was no less real for what was a fantasy that ended the moment it became possible to realize it. Nearly all of Lynch's films are a search for just such fault lines, which are especially pronounced in his subsequent films, Highway to Nowhere and Mulholland Drive, which obviously balance between different realities. nine0003
* Cuisinart is a manufacturer of kitchen appliances.
** This is the short name for the San Francisco Bay Area, a conurbation in Northern California.
Isabella Rossellini (Isabella Rossellini) biography of the actress, photo, personal life
Childhood of Isabella Rossellini
The famous film actress and fashion model Isabella Rossellini was born in June 1952 in the Italian capital - Rome. The girl was born in a creative family. Isabella's father is Italian director Roberto Rossellini, and her mother is Swedish actress Ingrid Bergman. nine0002 Isabella has a twin sister Isotta Ingrid Frieda Juliana. The father loved all his children very much (there was also an older brother in the family), but it was the twins that evoked the warmest feelings in him. Even before their birth, the happy father managed to inform all his acquaintances in Rome (and the famous director had many acquaintances) that Ingrid would soon give him two wonderful girls. A few years after the arrival of Isabella and Isotta, Roberto and Ingrid divorced.
Actress and model Isabella Rossellini delights
The girls initially lived with their mother, but when she left Italy and married Lars Schmidt, Roberto demanded the return of the sisters to Rome. The father took the older brother to him even before Ingrid married Lars, and soon after the wedding he achieved the return of the girls. The mother acted generously: in fact, it was Roberto who abandoned her, and she had the right to forbid her father even to see her daughters. As a result, the children were brought up by their father in a classic Italian family, where the father was the head of the house, the breadwinner and an object to follow. Roberto liked to repeat: “I will take the last piece of bread out of my mouth to feed my children,” and this was true. nine0002 At the age of thirteen, Isabella was diagnosed with a severe form of scoliosis. The girl was bedridden. The mother was mainly involved in the treatment of the child - she practically did not leave Isabella's bed.
The scoliosis progressed and the doctors' forecasts were disappointing: if the operation was unsuccessful, the girl would forever remain in a wheelchair. However, everything worked out, and subsequently, when looking at the magnificent graceful back of Isabella, no one could have imagined that in childhood her whole full life was subject to such a serious threat. nine0003 Film debut of Isabella Rossellini
The debut of Isabella Rossellini in cinema took place in 1985. The young actress got a small role of Daria Greenwood in the film "White Nights". In 1986, American director David Lynch invited Isabella to one of the main roles in the thriller Blue Velvet. The role of Dorothy Vallens in this film brought Rossellini worldwide success. The film was awarded seventeen awards, including four awards received by the actress herself. In 1987, Isabella Rossellini appears in one of the episodes of Nikita Mikhalkov's painting Black Eyes, based on the stories of A. Chekhov. Another movie 19'87 starring an actress - Norman Mailer's The Tough Guys Don't Dance - turned out to be a complete failure.
Many experts consider this picture the worst in Rossellini's filmography. In 1989, the actress appeared in the title role in Joel Schumacher's melodramatic film Relatives. Isabella Rossellini's beautiful body
Isabella Rossellini in the nineties
In 1990, David Lynch decided to renew his collaboration with Isabella, which turned out to be so successful in Blue Velvet. The actress gets one of the roles in the new project of the American director based on the novel "Wild at Heart" by Baria Gifford. Isabella's partners on the set are such stars as Laura Dern and Nicolas Cage. nine0002 In 1991, Rossellini appeared in the company of Alexander Shirvindt, Alexander Abdulov, Innokenty Smoktunovsky, Tom Conti, James Wilby in the Soviet comedy The Siege of Venice based on Carlo Goldoni's play The Cunning Widow. Rossellini's acting role truly knows no bounds - a year after the cheerful and joyful Siege of Venice, Isabella starred in the fantastic black comedy Death Becomes Her.
This time she had a chance to work with Bruce Willis and Meryl Streep. In the nineties, the actress consistently appeared in two or three films a year. The most successful for her career was 1998, when three projects with her participation at once were at the pinnacle of success: Jeroen Krabe's Left Luggage, The Impostors and Steve Barron's mini-series The Great Merlin. Isabella Rossellini for Lancôme
Isabella Rossellini currently
After the successful 1998, Isabella Rossellini began to appear less frequently in the frame. 2002 was marked by the participation of the actress in the film "Empire" and the mini-series "Napoleon", where the sultry Italian played the role of the beloved of the great dictator Josephine. The budget of the series was a record for Europe 46 million dollars. The project was awarded an Emmy, otherwise it could not be - the excellent directorial work of Yves Simono, based on the script by Max Gallo, was organically complemented by a truly stellar cast - John Malkovich, Gerard Depardieu took part in the film, and the role of Napoleon Bonaparte went to the inimitable Christian Clavier.
nine0002 The next appearance of Isabella Rossellini on the screens took place in 2004. The actress starred in Robert Lieberman's two-part film "The Wizard of Earthsea" based on the famous saga of the same name by Ursula le Guin. In 2008, Griffin Dan invited Rossellini to play in the drama The Accidental Husband starring Uma Thurman, Colin Firth and Jeffrey Morgan.
In 2012, another hit was released with the participation of Isabella - the silent film "Silent Life". In this unusual picture, the actress played the role of the mother of the first Hollywood sex symbol, Rudolph Valentino. nine0003
Activities other than cinematography
In addition to working in cinema, Isabella Rossellini often appeared on the covers of prestigious glossy magazines such as Vogue, Marie Claire, Harper's Bazaar and others. Since 1982, Isabella has been the face of the Lancome cosmetics company. Over time, Isabella's daughter Elettra becomes the face of this company. After leaving Lancome, Isabella receives an offer to become vice director of management for another cosmetics company, Lancaster.
Now Rossellini is a successful business woman. The actress also managed to test her strength in the writing field: at the moment, three books have been published from her pen: the memoirs Some of Me, the book dedicated to photographers Looking at Me and the novel about her father Remembering Roberto Rossellini. The actress is also engaged in social activities. She is a wildlife activist. Isabella directed two mini-series devoted to the peculiarities of reproduction of wild animals "Seduce Me" and "Green Porn". nine0048 Private life of Isabella Rossellini Isabella Rossellini married Martin Scorsese in 1979. Thirty-seven-year-old Scorsese very much reminded her of her late father, whom Isabella always treated with admiration and adoration. However, life with him turned out to be far from sugary - Martin turned out to be a notorious and puritanical person. Tired of the endless bans on doing what she loves - Isabella in those years devoted herself almost entirely to modeling and journalism, which annoyed Scorsese to the point of impossibility - the star eventually ran away from him, getting close to one of the filming partners in love with her - fashion model Jonathan Wideman.
nine0002 Isabella Rossellini had a turbulent personal life, but is now single This union, however, also proved to be short-lived, and two years later Isabella became convinced that Jonathan was unable to support his family. The actress did not want to leave her daughter, who appeared with Wideman, without a father, however, she no longer had the strength to live with him. In 1986, Rossellini received an invitation from David Lynch to shoot the film Blue Velvet. An affair with Lynch became the most tempestuous romantic adventure in her life. However, he turned out to be unhappy - in the end, Lynch, whom Rossellini never fully understood, left her without explanation. nine0002 Isabella and David stayed together until 1990. The actress was very upset by the breakup with Lynch. The actor Gary Oldman, who fell in love with her on the set of the film Immortal Beloved, saved her from severe depression. Gary offered Isabella to go down the aisle with him, but the actress decided to first arrange a "trial period" for him, during which Oldman had to get rid of alcohol addiction.
