Isabella in brief:
– She`s a twin; her sister Ingrid teaches medieval literature and is working toward a doctorate degree at Columbia University in New York.
”We`re very friendly. She has two children, I have one, so we`re always getting them together for weekends.”
– Her daughter, Elettra, is almost 8. ”She looks like her Dad (Jonathan Wiedemann, from whom Rossellini is divorced), but she`s blond; she doesn`t have his red hair.”
– She`s 5`8”, weighs from 125 to 130, works out (”but I don`t torture myself”), doesn`t diet (”but if I really did eat without watching, I would gain”).
– She almost always wears pants, mostly Zoran (”It packs best”) and Giorgio Armani (”You can`t go wrong”). More recently, she`s been wearing Romeo Gigli and Isaac Mizrahi. ”I wear things that last for many years. They become like a second skin.”
”When I went to school, we wore uniforms with skirts. I started wearing pants when I didn`t have to wear skirts, and once you start it`s hard to go back.”
The exception is a skirt by Azzedine Alaia. ”I told him I was too Catholic to wear his skirts. Finally I bought one, very tight, short. I wore it over and over again. So I told him, `Growing up with the nuns is finally wearing off.”`
– Her first job was with Italian television: ”Assistant to a sports journalist, then his field producer, then a reporter. I never really decided to live here, but there was lots of work. Then I married an American (Martin Scorsese) and little by little I got rooted here.” She lives in New York.
– She got into modeling by accident. Bruce Weber (photographer of Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren ads) asked to do some pictures. ”I knew him socially. I knew he liked to photograph non-model people.” Within two months, she was on the cover of Vogue, was being photographed by Avedon, then asked for a six-month leave of absence from her TV job. ”They said yes, we all laughed because we all felt it was not going to last. And now it`s more than 10 years that I`ve been modeling.”
– On aging: ”It hasn`t affected me yet, but it happens around 40, 45. It will come. I don`t expect to be an exception. Age doesn`t matter. Think of Tina Turner and her youthful energy.”
– On ”Cousins”: ”It was one of my favorite films. I was very happy when I did it. Vancouver was such a pleasant place. Everybody seemed to have their children there so we were all together and our children were in the film, too.”
– On her dual careers: ”I consider myself a model. From an American point of view, I`m more model than actress. I`ve been modeling for more years and I`ve made more money at it than at acting.
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”Acting is more respected. Modeling is not considered an art, acting is. I want to be a good actress and have a big career and choose all the films I want to do. But I am more established as a model. That doesn`t mean the other couldn`t happen.”