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Sex and the Very, Very Single Woman

Isabella Rossellini gets frank (twice) in U.S. stage debut

By Blake Green | STAFF WRITER

February 16, 2004

The headline of a recent magazine article about her - "Roman Goddess" - provokes a disapproving cluck from Isabella Rossellini. "I never read stories about myself," she says with only a cursory glance at her sparkling eyes, flawless complexion and full lips in the accompanying photograph.

Long a movie star, model and target for celebrity-seekers, Rossellini is making her American stage debut at 51. In "The Stendhal Syndrome," comprising two one-act plays by Terrence McNally that premiere tonight, she plays an Italian art guide introducing Michelangelo's magnificent sculpture of David to a group of American tourists, and the wife of a sexually charged orchestra maestro (played by Richard Thomas) with more on his mind than conducting Wagner.

Rossellini will not be reading reviews, but she is curious about reactions to the production. Some of her friends were offended by the plays' frank sexual language, she says while nibbling on a breakfast of oatmeal and fresh fruit. "But I wasn't. With Terrence, everything goes through the erotic. He's a man in his 60s who grew up in Corpus Christi [Texas] and has the urge to say things he was told as a kid were forbidden. It's explicit, but liberating."

Practical and down-to-earth, with her hair in a carefree pixie cut and her fingernails short and unpolished, Rossellini bears a striking resemblance to her late mother, actress Ingrid Bergman. (Her father was Italian movie director Roberto Rossellini.) Dressed in a tailored black pantsuit, white, open-necked shirt and Uggs boots, the latest winter-footwear fashion, she seems both friendly and reserved. At one point, she complains that the press is "insanely indiscreet."

But except for refusing to name any current romantic entanglements, the actress appears to take life as it comes, even this new theatrical adventure. "I am very, very single and like it immensely," says Rossellini, whose former companions include director Martin Scorsese, her first husband; director David Lynch, for whom she starred in 1986's "Blue Velvet," and Gary Oldman, her co-star in 1994's "Immortal Beloved." Some of these men popped up in "Some of Me," her somewhat fanciful 1997 memoir. But although she has joked that she intends to write a sequel, "More of Me," she says that won't be happening. "I don't want to do a confession," she says. "I have nothing to confess."

Her daughter, Elettra, by Joseph Wiedemann, husband No. 2, lives in Milan and is following in her mother's modeling footsteps. She also has an adopted son, Roberto, 10. Home is an Upper West Side apartment and a converted barn in Bellport. She maintains close ties with her twin sister, Ingrid, a professor of Italian literature at New York University. ("In our family, all the women had names with 'I,'" she says.) Her other siblings include half-sister Pia Lindstrom, a television journalist.

Having made dozens of movies since she was an extra in her mother's film "A Matter of Time" in 1976, Rossellini blames the delay of her theatrical debut on her accent. "Oh, I had coaches who tried to clean it up," she says about the lingering effect of her upbringing in Paris and Rome. "So much is based on diction and clarity in the theater - and it's not only accent, but gestures and body language. It is impossible to erase 20 years of a person's life."

If Rossellini sees her accent as limiting, Leonard Foglia, who's directing "Stendhal," doesn't agree. "It's an international world we live in, particularly in New York," he says. "But since it's been a concern for her, this [playing two Europeans] immediately took the onus off and put her more at ease."

When Foglia proposed Rossellini to McNally, the playwright, who had seen her in many films, immediately agreed. "It works perfectly," McNally says.

For years, much of Rossellini's time was occupied with modeling. Discovered in her late 20s by the photographer Bruce Weber, she appeared on hundreds of fashion magazine covers, and for 14 years was the face in Lanc"me cosmetic advertisements.

"I worked with the greatest people. Many doors opened for me," she says. "I would like to be still modeling, but there is little room for people my age."

Her contract with Lanc"me ended after she turned 40. "I understand their logic, although I don't think it was the right logic," she says of her replacement by a younger model. "I do still use their cream; it is a good product."

Appearing onstage for the first time has brought surprises. "On film you never see the writers; it's been fun to work with Terrence," she says. She'd been warned that theater was hard work. "But nothing has been as hard as [what] I did as a model."

The salary is another matter. For her Off-Broadway performance, she is paid about $300 a week, and although Rossellini says she had heard there was no money in nonprofit theater, she was shocked. "It's a life that borders on welfare. I don't think I can afford to do this very often."

Fortunately, she has other work, often in films: Rossellini recently appeared in a segment of the ABC series "Alias," and expects to repeat the role in two more episodes. Her movies "Saddest Music in the World" and Peter Greenaway's trilogy, "Tulse Luper," are yet to be released.

What she calls "my big work" is with the European-based Lancaster Group, for which she has helped develop three perfumes. Rossellini has taken to thinking of the venture as "what subsidizes my art."