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ISABELLA ROSSELLINI
Tickets for this evening's event with Isabella Rossellini are still available! They can be purchased at the Benaroya Hall Box Office beginning at 6pm with cash or check only. Tickets will be available at all seating levels. ***Please scroll to the bottom of the page to read the Paris article. Biography “As a storyteller, Isabella is at once an awestruck little girl and a regal beauty with a hair-trigger laugh and a taste for the Grand Guignol. She is frank, practical, perceptive, refreshingly morbid and always surprising.” —Guy Maddin Biography 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 American Vogue. 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 Lancôme cosmetics exclusive international spokes-model, until the company decided in 1996 that a forty-four-year-old woman was no longer the Lancôme 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 Lancôme 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 of Alias 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 second 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. Excerpt from Some of Me (1997) There are the stones around my sink, all from places meaningful to me. One is from Dannholmen, the little Swedish island my mother used for summer holidays, where she wanted her ashes to be scattered. There’s the volcanic black one from Stromboli, where my parents fell in love and made the film with that title. There’s the San Pietrino from Rome, the cobblestone…that makes me think of my native city and the 1968 movement during which we used to throw such stones at the police. There are the ones picked up by my aunt, Zia Marcella, from the beach at Santa Marinella, where we had our summerhouse, which she used to make a soap dish. There are stones from the holy Ganges to make me think of my Indian relatives. Next to my bed there are Madonnas, Christs, Vishnus, crucifixes, devils, burning souls, horns, and a Buddha—all there together just in case one works better than the others, and to celebrate coexistence. There’s the “bee board” that David Lynch made for me, to humor my love for animals, and his “chicken kit” with instructions on how to put back together a butchered chicken like those you buy at the supermarket. Framed on the wall are the stamps the Italian government issued with an image from the film Open City, which my dad directed. They made me feel we had reached a pinnacle of fame. My dad even got a street named after him.
Books/Short Films Selected Filmography
Green Porno on the Sundance Channel Newsweek article on Rossellini and Green Porno, September 17, 2009 February 1996 interview with Rossellini after 14 years with Lancôme May 2007 interview with Rossellini about her career and parents Article: Canadian filmmaker wows 'em in Paris
Photograph by: Adam L. Weintraub, Vitagraph Pictures PARIS — Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin, whose career is as rich with awards and critical acclaim as it is devoid of a mainstream commercial breakthrough, struggled this week when asked if something might be changing as a result of his spectacular, multi-faceted leap into one of the world’s toughest markets for English-speaking foreign artists. The Winnipeg director, famous among cinephiles for his dream-like, grainy, 1920s-style black-and-white films, has triggered widespread media coverage here in numerous major print and electronic media outlets. The highlight was a full-page spread in celebrity-dominated Paris Match, the glossy equivalent in France of People Magazine. A chuckling Maddin, 53, whose first film screening in Paris in 1993 drew about a dozen people, managed to say “probably not” and “maybe it will” without drawing a breath when asked if his success here could be leveraged into something bigger back in North America. “I’ve always thought if I just do the best job I can maybe the stars will align and something might sneak into a broader viewing public,” he admitted. Then he just as quickly ends any thought of a sudden change of fortunes. “I don’t even allow myself those kinds of daydreams anymore,” he said. “If I allow myself to enjoy anything too much it’ll be taken away from me.” Despite his nagging doubts Parisians are flocking to a retrospective of the Winnipeg director’s films being played over a three-week period starting Oct. 15 at the Pompidou Centre, one of the world’s most famous centres of culture and the arts. Next door to the Pompidou Centre, Maddin’s most recent film, My Winnipeg (re-titled Winnipeg Mon Amour here), opened Wednesday in one of two Paris movie theatres. My Winnipeg is a 2007 documentary that mixes historical fact, childhood memories both real and imagined, and myths in a humourous film that seems to meld Igmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal with Michael Moore’s Roger & Me. “I really liked it,” said Florence Gilbert, 23, as she left the theatre with three other friends, all students, who learned about the film a day earlier thanks to a review in Le Monde. “I thought it was funny, really impressive, and really beautiful.” Maddin’s tour de force in Paris, though, occurred Monday before a full house at the historic 800-seat Odeon Theatre, one of France’s five national theatres that was inaugurated in 1782 by Marie-Antoinette. The 800 audience members paid up to $50 a ticket to see a remarkable version of his 2006 silent film Brand Upon The Brain! The show included an orchestra, an opera singer, and a three-person audio effects team providing the sounds for everything from kissing to footsteps to bubbly laboratory experiments. Providing narration in perfect French was Isabella Rossellini, the international film star (and daughter of legendary actress Ingrid Bergman and Italian director Roberto Rossellini), whose role as Maddin’s “muse” has helped expand the director’s reach since she starred in his 2003 film The Saddest Music in the World. The show earned a long and powerful ovation that left Maddin glowing. “I’ve always felt a connection with the French audience long before I even set foot in France or made a movie,” Maddin told Canwest News Service before heading into a post-show reception. “When I first came here (in 1995, during a retrospective of Canadian films) you could feel the audience just a little bit more open to something a little different. And it’s been good ever since.” Fabrice Leroy, a partner with the French film company E.D. Distribution, said Rossellini’s involvement both past and present was crucial in opening the door to this autumn’s success. He said Maddin always received rave reviews, but there was a poor turnout until The Saddest Music in the World. “We had feedback that many people reading reviews of Guy’s films thought that what he was doing was amazing, but they were afraid. They thought, ‘these films must be too strange, I’m not sure I want to see that.’ “And the fact that Isabella was in the film assured people. They said, ‘OK, we can go.’ And it was very successful.” Maddin and his distributors spent almost three years preparing the round for this autumn’s commercial release of My Winnipeg. The Monday show at the Odeon Theatre was enormously costly, he said, but Maddin got a break when the Paris Autumn Festival agreed to be a sponsor. But the project was still short of cash until Louise Blais, the cultural attache at the Canadian embassy in Paris, obtained a relatively tiny federal government financial contribution that was critical in allowing the project to proceed. The jury remains out on whether Maddin can draw big crowds from the non-cinephile crowd. A healthy 276 Parisians turned out on a rainy Wednesday to see the film in both theatres, and a ticket-taker said she expects much bigger crowds on the weekend. “Everybody is telling us, it’s amazing, it’s a breakthrough for Guy,” said Leroy of the attention their client is getting. “But we’re saying, ‘let’s wait and see if it has an effect.’” © Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun
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Benaroya Hall, 7:30 pm