Isabella Rossellini, 71 years of proverbial beauty, two parents so legendary in the history of cinema that just saying them gives you goosebumps – Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman – and then her great curiosity, her radiant smile, her Kindness and her innate elegance. It’s hard to define her: she is a model, actress, director, farmer with her organic farm, behavioral scientist and much more. “These are all phases of my life. My passion for fashion started at the academy, I wanted to become a costume designer, then all the encounters, even random ones, led me to do many things, but I know,” she says in an interview with ANSA – that I am my complexity and none of these things alone is enough to define me. At 50 I returned to university, I was the oldest in the class, but I fulfilled my dream of becoming an ethologist, I love animals and I remember with emotion how my father gave King Solomon’s ring. And when I was 50, I also became a director. Now Alice Rohrwacher has also made me want to return to a set at my age for “The Chimera.”
Isabella Rossellini receives the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Video Rome Film Festival
She was awarded a lifetime achievement award at the Rome Film Festival and will also hold a master class carefully prepared, as documented on Instagram, the social network she easily uses. The award was presented to her by her long-time friend Renzo Arbore (“I am pleased to reward you for the grace with which you have exercised your talents”) and Alice Rohrwacher. “I feel honored and also touched by this election of President Gian Luca Farinelli: We have known each other for a few years, she restored many of my father’s films with the Cineteca and we have become friends, I am grateful to her.” I am also wearing today I have my parents with me: I chose Stromboli for Papa, a film that is almost a shock to see today given the misery in Italy at the time, and Mama Autumn Symphony, her latest film, which is an example of this How to Be a Child actor was chosen because behind her first gentle tone lies the anecdote of a heated argument he had with Ingmar Bergman and a surge of anger at being silenced as a woman.
Has having both parents placed a heavy burden on your life and career at times? “Never,” he replies, “for me and for the world they are two myths that changed the history of cinema, but you have to know that they were also two wonderful and extraordinary people and I believe that certain things that “I have done in my life are due to this.” for them, for being an avant-garde father and a courageous and unconventional mother. When I was young, I insisted on meritocracy and for that reason I didn’t want to be an actress, the comparison with my mother would have devastated me. When I was young, I became a model and had so much success that it gave me that back then gave me the courage to become an actress. I designed my life the way I wanted, that was her training.”
Regret? “I always did what I wanted, but I should have done it more often,” he says, smiling. For example, as a director he says: “I made 50 short films, like the Green Porn series, and they were successful in America, it’s a shame I didn’t pluck up the courage until late.” And think about it, a feature film close? “It’s a question of money, my father, my husbands – Martin Scorsese, David Lynch ed – my lovers, all artists, looking for financing, thanks also no.”
Beautiful model, how is your relationship with your time? “Beauty? First we have to define them. If we think about tall, skinny blondes, I’m out! Beauty is limiting.”
I’ve been visiting Italy more often for a few years now, I have a lot of friends, like Renzo Arbore – his reports as a beautiful girl in America on L’Altra Domenica are a cult from times long past, editor’s note. Red. – but I spent my whole life in America and was welcomed, it was already too late – she laughs – when they realized that I was Italian, I was already one of them.” And then the farm and the animals , “my chickens and all the others, although the dogs remain my favorites”.
Isabella Rossellini notes: “The role of women in cinema is changing, there are more and more directors and many stories have the female gaze, which is always inclusive, I am happy about the new generations. Years ago they were exceptions, my mother once said to me: ‘I’ve done a lot of films, I could direct’, but the feeling was like ‘I want to be an astronaut’.”
And tomorrow? “The future is short, I’m 71 years old, who knows how healthy I’ll be moving forward, we have to be realistic.”
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