Isabella Rossellini, nữ diễn viên bị Lancôme sa thải và được điện ảnh tìm lại ở tuổi 72

Isabella Rossellini

Photo: Kevin Payravi / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Sinh	18 tháng 6, 1952 Rome, Italy
Nghề nghiệp	Diễn viên, đạo diễn, người mẫu
Nổi tiếng với	Gia Đình Siêu Nhân 2, Nhung Xanh, Enemy
Giải thưởng	Academy Award · Independent Spirit · Saturn Award, Best Supporting Actress, Death Becomes Her (1993) · SAG Award · Golden Camera Award, Best International Actress, Fearless (1993) · European Film Academy Lifetime Achievement Award (2024) · Locarno Film Festival Excellence Award (2026)

There is a particular silence that falls when Isabella Rossellini enters a scene. In Edward Berger’s Conclave, she appears as Sister Agnes for less than eight minutes — a fraction of the film’s runtime — yet the performance drew her first Academy Award nomination, arriving at an age when most actresses have spent a decade being written out of the conversation.

She was born in Rome to two people who were, by the time of her birth, among the most discussed in the world: the Swedish actress Ingrid Bergman and the Italian neorealist director Roberto Rossellini. Their liaison had produced a congressional scandal before she drew her first breath; her twin sister Isotta, her half-siblings on both sides of the Atlantic, and an inherited pressure that she spent the better part of five decades quietly dismantling.

The early choices were quietly antiestablishment. She worked as a translator, then as a television reporter for RAI, where she conducted a pre-fame interview with Martin Scorsese, who would later become her husband. Her acting debut, in Vincente Minnelli’s A Matter of Time, placed her opposite her mother in a role where the generational weight was immediately visible. But the direction her career took next was more counterintuitive: she became a model, not an actress.

From 1982 to 1996, Rossellini was the international face of Lancôme — fourteen years during which she became one of the most photographed women on the planet, photographed by Richard Avedon and Annie Leibovitz, earning what one 1983 report described as $9,000 a day, involved in the 1990 creation of the Trésor fragrance. The role was also an ideological trap. In 1996, at forty-three, the contract was terminated on the explicit grounds that cosmetics advertising requires the dream of youth, and she was no longer young enough to carry it. The dismissal, stated without euphemism, became one of the more documented cases of industry ageism.

What Lancôme had been doing — converting her into a surface — David Lynch briefly reversed. His Blue Velvet cast her as Dorothy Vallens, a nightclub singer trapped inside a sadomasochistic nightmare that made audiences and test-screeners deeply uncomfortable. Her agency dropped her when they saw the footage. The film won her an Independent Spirit Award for Best Female Lead, and the relationship with Lynch that followed — the most significant of her life, by her own account — sustained her through a decade of experimental Hollywood work. Wild at Heart and Death Becomes Her followed, then Fearless, then a quieter stretch.

Here is what the conventional narrative of her career gets wrong: it treats the modeling decade as an interruption of her artistic life rather than as its most revealing chapter. The assumption that a serious actress could not also be a beauty industry symbol ignores what Blue Velvet itself was doing — casting that very surface as the vehicle for something violent and strange. The Lancôme dismissal was a crisis, but it was also a data point that Rossellini processed like a scientist: she turned her attention to the study of behavior rather than the performance of desirability, and the results were more interesting than anything her industry had imagined for her.

The Green Porno series, which she conceived, wrote, directed, and performed beginning in 2008, explored animal reproductive behavior using cardboard constructions and physical comedy. It generated more than four million YouTube views and a theatrical monologue that toured more than fifty cities. At sixty-six, she completed a master’s degree in animal behavior and conservation at Hunter College in New York. The work that emerged — Green Porno, Mammas, the Unanimal documentary — operates in a register that exists outside the standard categories of cinema or performance. It is closer to natural philosophy rendered visible.

The rehabilitation of her beauty industry chapter arrived, with some irony, in 2016: Lancôme rehired her at sixty-three, with a female CEO who reversed the 1996 decision and made her a global brand ambassador. But the more significant reversal came from the films. Conclave gave her a role commensurate with her range — and the Oscar nomination that followed confirmed what had been clear to the more attentive corners of the industry for some time: that her late career was not a graceful final chapter but an active creative period. She received the Locarno Film Festival Excellence Award on the festival’s opening night in August 2026, days before she begins shooting Alice Rohrwacher’s Three Incestuous Sisters alongside Dakota Johnson and Saoirse Ronan.

Rossellini farms organic produce on Long Island, holds honorary degrees from multiple universities, and directs the Howard Gilman Foundation. She has spoken about her marriages — to Scorsese, to Jon Wiedemann, and the significant bond with Lynch — with the same empirical directness she applies to everything else. She carries the weight of three languages and three continents lightly.

In March 2026, she premiered a new one-woman show blending personal storytelling with questions of nature and identity. She describes herself, these days, as more experimental filmmaker than actress. At the Locarno festival — the same platform where her father’s neorealism once shaped what Italian cinema could mean — she is being honored not for surviving her origins but for having finally, thoroughly, moved past them.