Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
Why can’t a woman be appealing after 40?
Isabella Rossellini, 80s siren and star of Blue Velvet, on ageism, flirting with Bradley Cooper – and life with her legendary parents.
Brooding over Bradley Cooper, Isabella Rossellini is in such a swoon I fear she’s going to slip off her chair. ‘Ooh Bradley,’ she halfgasps with so much longing it’s a miracle she managed to keep her hands off him when they worked on the Oscar-nominated film Joy last year. It turns out it wasn’t for lack of trying. ‘I saw him as a sexual object but he didn’t see me as a sexual object, that was absolutely clear,’ says Isabella, who at 64 is a good two decades older than Bradley. ‘Then I regretted that I don’t turn heads any more.’
She laughs a rich throaty laugh that doesn’t sound particularly regretful. ‘I said, “Oh Bradley, if I was 30 years younger you wouldn’t have been able to escape me.”’ Indeed. Thirty years ago Isabella was the luminous face of Lancôme and one of the most lusted-after actresses on the planet, particularly after starring as tortured nightclub singer Dorothy Vallens in David Lynch’s erotic thriller Blue Velvet in 1986. Add to this her movie-royalty parentage – her mother was three-time Oscar winner Ingrid Bergman, her father the great Italian film director Roberto Rossellini – and, well, let’s just say she was hot enough to stir even Bradley Cooper’s blood.
Indeed, Lynch was so seduced by his leading lady he set up home with her. Although they broke up after six years, he remains – alongside her first husband, director Martin Scorsese – her ‘most significant relationship’. There were others, including her second husband and grown-up daughter Elettra’s father, model turned Microsoft executive Jon Wiedemann; actor Gary Oldman; theatre director Gregory Mosher and... well, you get the picture, a succession of brilliant, brainy men.
Today, Isabella lives alone on a 27- acre farm on Long Island in New York State. ‘If I were to find a great companion that would be great, but just to be with a man because women cannot conceive themselves as being single...’ the sentence ends in an exasperated shrug. ‘I was so trained when I was younger that a woman is defined by a man – that she makes herself pretty to seduce a man in the oldfashioned way. Now I do it for me.
‘I’m living the life I want to live. My best friend has been married for 45 years. When I call her and say, “This film is out. Do you want to see it?”, she says, “Let me ask my husband.”’ Again, there’s an exasperated shake of the head. ‘It’s not her husband. He’s lovely, but I always feel I can move faster on my own and... my bees...’
Bees? Isabella has somehow moved from seducing men to bees without drawing breath. There is a connection (she puts on her lipstick each day before tending to the bees she keeps on her farm), but you have to be on the ball to keep up with her quicksilver mind. We meet in Rome where Isabella is hosting Sky Arts’ photographic talent contest Master Of Photography. The eight-part series will be broadcast to more than 21 million viewers across the UK, Ireland, Italy, Germany and Austria as 12 finalists – including three UK contestants, Neal Gruer, Gina Soden and Rupert Frere – seek to impress a panel of judges.
Isabella is hosting because, as she says with her delightful forthrightness, ‘I’m acceptable in England, Germany and Italy.’ She also happens to have worked with the leading photographers of the age, having appeared on 28 covers of Vogue before turning to acting. Today she remains jaw-drop- pingly beautiful but in a defiant whywould-I-do-Botox sort of way.
The decision not to kowtow to the pressures of looking forever young was taken at 40 when she was dropped from her Lancôme contract. ‘The idea that a woman cannot be appealing after 40, that she can’t make other people dream, is...’ She snorts in disgust. ‘The marketing research said people appreciated a 40-year-old advertising anti-ageing cream because I added credibility. But Lancôme was blind to it. They pretended the research never existed and that there are no women who are considered beautiful after 40. We’re born, we grow up, we age, we die. We cannot change this. When it became evident I was a victim of ageism I never felt, “Let me have plastic surgery so I can prolong my career.” That would feel like winning the battle but losing the war, because in the end, you still grow old.’
Isabella, who was born in Rome, was five years old when her parents divorced, after her father ran off with Indian writer Sonali Dasgupta. Roberto was a proud man who spent money with abandon. ‘He was a great artist yet he had no cash. He was always on the brink of poverty. People think fame goes with money but sometimes it doesn’t.’
Isabella moved to New York to stay with her mother at the age of 19 but her modelling career didn’t take off until she was 28. Neither of her parents saw her reach the top in that sphere, for her father died of a heart attack when she was 24 and her mother from cancer just before she signed to Lancôme in 1982 aged 30. There’s a deep sadness about her when she talks about it now. ‘Mama saw the beginning of my work as a model but died before any of the Vogue covers came out. I remember she kept telling me, “This is going to change your life.” It was true. Six months later I got Lancôme.’ But despite her success, Isabella craved the security of the family she’d lost. She met Elettra’s father Wiedemann on a photo shoot, got pregnant and ended her four-year marriage to Scorsese in that order. Then she met Lynch. ‘We didn’t get married. We just had an affair...’ she says with a dismissive wave of the hand.
Life for Isabella is about adventure, it’s what keeps her lively. When Elettra and Isabella’s adopted son Roberto left home four years ago she pulled herself together, sold up and moved to her farm. ‘The country fulfils that thing I was never able to fulfil before because I was working and I was a mother,’ she says. ‘I didn’t have the time for it. So when the children moved out I bought a little farm and started a new adventure. You see, there are new chapters that can open throughout your life.’