Event
Seattle Arts & Lectures Presents Isabella Rossellini
Isabella Rossellini, daughter of Italian neorealist film pioneer Roberto Rossellini and legendary Swedish actress Ingrid Bergman, was born to be creative. As a child living in Rome, she eschewed the daily siesta to daydream of the "full and interesting life I promised myself." Growing up, Rossellini absorbed her mother's down-to-earth sense of practicality and her father's love of fantasy and imagination.
Rossellini moved to New York when she was 19, where she attended Finch College, worked as a translator and a circus ringmaster, and expressed her playful sense of humor on the Italian TV comedy revue The Other Sunday, conducting offbeat interviews with notables like Muhammad Ali and Martin Scorsese. Her credo was simple: "I meet a person who strikes me as intelligent and interesting, and I want to take a trip into their brain."
Rossellini married Scorsese in 1979--a marriage that lasted three years--just at the time she emerged as a high-fashion model photographed for British and AmericanVogue. While she has one of the most beautiful faces in the world, she is modest about her physical attributes and gives much of the credit for her success to photographer-artists Richard Avedon and Bill King, who made her warmth and intelligence radiate from, ultimately, 500 magazine covers around the world. Beginning in 1982 Rossellini served as Lancme cosmetics exclusive international spokes-model, until the company decided in 1996 that a forty-four-year-old woman was no longer the Lancme ideal. Rossellini moved on, launching her successful cosmetics line Isabella Rossellini's Manifesto. Ironically, Rossellini's daughter Elettra, from Rossellini's marriage to model-turned-Microsoft-executive Jonathan Wiedmann, is now a face of Lancme cosmetics.
Rossellini's ability to project thought and emotion in still photographs led her into an outstanding film career. Over the past thirty-three years she has appeared in sixty-four films and television shows, from White Nights, Cousins, and Fearless to episodes ofAlias and 30 Rock. Her iconic role remains the benighted nightclub singer Dorothy Vallens in Blue Velvet (1986) by David Lynch.
Rossellini wrote the memoir Some of Me (1997), Looking at Me (on pictures and photographers) (2002), and In the Name of the Father, the Daughter and the Holy Spirit: Remembering Roberto Rossellini (2006). In the Name of the Father comes with a short film in which she plays Alfred Hitchcock, Federico Fellini, her mother Ingrid Bergman, and her father, who is seen as a large, pillowy, talking tummy.
Through all of her creative expressions, Rossellini embodies her own definition of "true style: the fullest, boldest expression of a self." Two years ago Rossellini created Green Porno, a series of short films for the Internet about the sex lives of animals, now in its third season on The Sundance Channel. She writes, directs, and performs one-minute shorts in costumes she designs. "I was also fascinated by the infinite, strange, and 'scandalous' ways that insects copulate," says Rossellini. The book Green Porno was published this fall by HarperStudio. It includes 125 film stills of Rossellini in costume along with a narrative text and a DVD of both series.
Rossellini gives time and money to the preservation of her parents' films and she is a former trustee of George Eastman House and a 1997 George Eastman Award honoree for her support of film preservation. She is involved in various conservation efforts and is a dedicated trainer of Labrador puppies for the blind. Rossellini is working on a B.A. at NYU. She lives outside New York City.
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LocationS. Mark Taper Foundation Auditorium, Benaroya Hal
200 University St
Seattle, WA 98101
United States
Categories
| Kid Friendly: No |
| Dog Friendly: No |
| Non-Smoking: No |
| Wheelchair Accessible: No |
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