6: Isabella Rossellini in the 1990s

You Must Remember This

Karina Longworth

Tv & Film

4.6 • 15.7K Ratings

🗓️ 17 June 2014

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today we celebrate the 62nd birthday of actress/model/filmmaker Isabella Rossellini. She was born into Hollywood scandal: her mother, Ingrid Bergman, was denounced on the floor of Congress for her adulterous relationship with Isabella’s father, Italian neorealist director Roberto Rossellini. Isabella herself would go on to have romances with Martin Scorsese and David Lynch, finding her signature film role in the latter’s Blue Velvet. But her parentage and romantic relationships are only part of the story. She made her own fortune modeling, a career which the former scoliosis patient started at the relatively advanced age of 28, ultimately serving an unprecedented 14 years as the face of Lancome. In the 1990s — a decade which began with her being dumped by David Lynch and ended with her launching a company which she referred to as “a secret feminist plot” against the beauty industry — Isabella Rossellini took her legacy into her own hands.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to another episode of You Must Remember This.
0:29.1	The podcast dedicated to exploring the secrets and or forgotten histories of Hollywood's
0:36.6	first century. Part of the Paneple Network. I'm your host, Karina Longworth. Up to this
0:44.2	point, most of our stories have been centered in the middle of that century, more or less
0:48.4	within the constraints of the golden age of the studio era, the heyday of what some
0:53.0	people refer to as classical Hollywood cinema. This episode is different.
1:15.8	In this episode, those Halsion mid-century days are the past that hangs over the life of
1:21.1	our heroine, a modern woman whose timeless beauty and old Hollywood pedigree sometimes
1:26.4	inspire a temptation to turn her into a character outside of time. Famous first for being
1:32.4	the daughter of Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rosalini, and then as a muse to not one but two of
1:38.4	the great American end of the millennium altars, in the years buttressing her 40th birthday,
1:43.7	she found herself at a crossroads, suddenly single, and then fired from the job that had allowed
1:50.3	her to support herself and define herself independently of the men in her life for 14 years.
1:57.4	This is the story of how she got to that crossroads and what she did next. Join us,
2:03.4	won't you? As we wish a very happy 60-second birthday to Isabella Rosalini.
2:20.6	It started with a call in the middle of the night. It's fall 1990 and Isabella Rosalini is alone
2:29.2	in a hotel room in Russia. She's there to shoot a movie, an Italian marriage farce in which she
2:33.7	plays a widow pursued by three suitors under pressure from the Italian government to keep her
2:38.3	fortune in the country. She's 38 and though she's only been acting and earnest for about five years,
2:44.8	she's internationally famous. Her face much more recognizable than that of the average 37 things
2:50.1	spawn of a mid-century movie star and legendary independent filmmaker,
2:54.1	thanks to her long-held position as spokesmodel for Lancome. It was modeling, which she had only
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