Some of Isabella Rossellini

BY Becky Brett

Rossellini

On Feb. 7 Isabella Rossellini launched the 2008 Smart Talk Women’s Lecture Series at Milwaukee’s Marcus Center for the Arts. For those of you who primarily know her as Bianca Donaghy, Jack Donaghy’s ex-wife on 30 Rock, kindly lean over so the person next to you can smack you in the head. For the rest of us who have admired her film work since Blue Velvet, hearing her share her story in person was a real treat.

The Smart Talk series is held in smaller cities throughout the U.S., and PerformInk will be covering upcoming lectures by Lisa Ling and Marlo Thomas later this spring. (There is also a lecture by Valerie Plame, though it has nothing to do with theatre—on stage, anyway.) If you have the time and the inclination, consider a trip up there yourself or to one of their Rockford programs to see these women live (www.smarttalkwomen.com).

I happened to be seated next to Errol J. Menke, managing partner of EJ-Vestco Industries and an investor in the series. Along with his wife, Kathy, Menke believes that the Smart Talk series can be a vital force for women worldwide. “We have serious potential to create change in the world we’re in,” he said. He stressed that as he would like to see the series grow, careful consideration is given to each speaker to ensure that they are indeed as strong a role model as they are being billed.

He also said, “Look, men have been running the world for how long? And look at where we are.” That is not to say women cannot be as corrupt in leadership as men, but he pointed out that if all the women in the Marcus Center were to be tasked with solving a major problem, it would get done. He did not share the same confidence that a room full of men would achieve the same outcome.

In particular, this evening’s woman, Isabella Rossellini, has built a dichotomous career as an ardent feminist fighting for women’s rights, particularly in Italy, while earning millions as a model and the face of Lanc(TM)me cosmetics.

Rossellini not only descends from cinematic royalty, as the daughter of Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini, but she is distinguished in her own right as a writer, filmmaker and conservationist. She was introduced as an icon of style with substance, but someone who has the beauty of a life lived with curiosity, humor, imagination and passion.

Family has always been central to her life, although she admits being the daughter of famous parents had its strange moments. She did not fully understand how famous her parents were, and as a child she thought every parent was famous. The same confusion befell her daughter Elettra.

When she was a little girl, Elettra’s teacher was instructing the students on what to do in case they got lost—such as memorize your address, your phone number, your parents’ names. “The teacher asked my daughter, ‘OK you are lost at the airport. What do you do? [Elettra] said ‘I’d sit under my mom’s poster.’” (At the time Rossellini was at the height of her Lanc(TM)me advertisements and her photo was everywhere.)

Elettra further explained to her teacher, “Didn’t you notice? Everywhere on the streets and the highways, everywhere is filled with these pictures. They are all moms and dads so in case their children get lost they can go sit under their poster.’”

Rossellini laughed, “She missed the entire advertisement world.”

Rossellini’s own parents met and fell in love when making the film, Stromboli. At the time Italy had just come through WWII. Bergman was the number one actress in Hollywood, and Roberto Rossellini was an exciting young director in Italy. Bergman had seen some of Roberto’s films and thought they were “extraordinary, and contacted him because she thought maybe she could lend her fame and give him a stronger voice.

“It was as if Julia Roberts went to Iraq to work with the best Iraqi director, fell in love and stayed to live in Iraq.” Unfortunately, they were both married to other people at the time, and Bergman got pregnant (with Isabella and her twin sister, Isotta).

Rossellini remembered that acting was a calling for Bergman, as filmmaking was a calling for Roberto. “She used to say to me, ‘I didn’t choose acting. Acting chose me.’

“My father making film—it wasn’t just making film it was a total revolution. My father became known for his film style called neo-realism… After the war film was…really a way to have a fantasy. Basically it was to distract. Father saw film as a medium that could bring knowledge, consciousness to people.”

Her father used to work often with non-actors. “He would say, ‘If I need a fisherman, even if I get Laurence Olivier or Cary Grant there is no makeup and no acting skills that would be as powerful as photographing the fisherman with the sunburned skin, the hands, the movement when he would clean the nets.’

“My father believed that cinema was one of the great technological discoveries of the 20^th century. Film will defeat ignorance in the world.”

Living with these two strong talents, it took Rossellini much longer to find her own voice. She is admittedly a daddy’s girl, so she first thought she would work to help her father. At the time, her father needed a costume designer, so she attended the Academy of Fashion and Costumes in Italy.

When she started acting, she preferred working with strong directors of independent films. “People of great vision and great authority.” She did not “mind obeying them. It was like being a tourist in their mind… I think that I am at service to their vision.

“Theater director Bob Wilson said (and I think it was a compliment),‘What I loved about Isabella is that she is not an actress. She has no ego. She just does whatever I tell her to do.’”

Rossellini explained, “I found that this way it is engaging and playful and if the play becomes successful you have everything to gain and if it is not successful nobody notices. To sustain the reputation of a super star I find it heavy and scary and exhausting, so I think this is how I got my reputation as an actress of independent projects.”

She was quick to point out, though, that she did not want to say that she only interpreted the “big genius mind. I also tried to be entrepreneurial and do my own projects.” It just took her longer.

Rossellini was born in 1952 in Italy—“a very different Italy from the one today”—and she notes, “One pleasure of growing old is you acquire a sense of history without even trying.” The Italy she was born into was a poor country ringing with machismo and the bells of the Catholic church. “There was no divorce. There was no contraception. Contraception was outlawed.”

As a teenager she became very involved in the feminist movement. “There were a lot of debate about women housewives even getting a salary. You talk about independence, but if you always have to ask your husband or your father for money, they have you.”

It was tricky reconciling a modeling career with her feminist beliefs, but one thing it did do was provide her with enough money that she could be independent. “Having money is the base of independence, especially for women,” she said.

In her modeling career, she was fortunate to work with photographer Richard Avedon, who taught her what her responsibilities were as a model. “He said, ‘Modeling is not a major art. It’s not the building of a cathedral. It’s a small art. It’s like embroidery.’ He taught me my responsibility as a model…to really have emotion in my face.

“One time I was posing for Dick Avedon and he just placed himself in front of me holding an extension so he wasn’t behind the camera he was next to it. It was like going fishing. He would wait for me to have a good impression and POP! So I was posing in front of him and he said, ‘I don’t like what you are thinking. Change your thoughts.’ Change my thoughts? Come up with something else? How does he know what I’m thinking? So I went back to the first thought I had and instantly he said, ‘No. I told you I don’t like that thought. Change it.”

Modeling is often perceived as a lesser art than acting, but “to me modeling is almost like being a silent movie actress…you still have to have emotion. That is what a great photo is all about. There is no beauty without emotion.”

However, her mother did give her some contrary advice. “My mom gave me one of the strangest advice, which I pass onto you. When she worked on Casablanca the script was being written and rewritten as they were doing it.” There was no ending yet, and they did not know if Bergman would go with her heroic husband or run off with the romantic Rick. In that famous scene when she walks into the caf? and sees Rick for the first time in many years, no one knew who she would end up with and so she had to make a choice.

“Mother decided to do nothing… ‘I decided to have a blank face because I knew there was going to be music afterward and the audience would project the feeling that you need. If I were to tint it with any expression and then the ending would be different, it would be wrong. ‘ I thought that was such clever advice to go blank and let the music tell the story. You need a very smart actress to know when to use nothing.”

In applying modeling to acting, Rossellini noted that it is important to understand the power of gesture and image. “The kink of a shoulder either relaxed or up can change the feel.”

The strongest example she had was David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.

When Rossellini shot Blue Velvet, Lynch told her that there was to be a scene in which she is nude, but explained that it should not be sensual at all. Instead he related it to a story from his childhood when he and his brother saw a woman walking naked in the street and he started to cry. It scared them, and he wanted that same feeling in Blue Velvet when she appears nude.

Rossellini immediately recalled a famous photo from the Vietnam war taken by Nick Ut of children running down a road after their village was napalmed. There is a naked girl, arms outstretched, coming toward the camera. “This gesture is completely helpless,” said Rossellini, and noted that if she had tried to cover herself in any way, this character would still have had some measure of dignity. Instead she chose this gesture of total helplessness.

Moments like that it is interesting to see the inspiration and then the result of that inspiration. Theatre is a much more fleeting art form, as no two performances are exactly the same. Bergman once did a play, and when Rossellini saw it, she found her mother afterward just standing on the stage, very melancholy. Bergman said, “‘Theatre is so ephemeral. Our talent is finished after tonight. Thank god for cinema.”