After shooting 50 films –mythical ‘Blue Velvet’–, rush three husbands and be the archetype of beauty on covers and cosmetics, isabella rosellini (Rome, 1952) could be limited to a quiet life in Mama Farm, a 10.5-hectare organic farm on Long Island where, together with his daughter Elettra, he caresses for chickens and turkeys, sheep and ducks. But no. The daughter of Ingrid Bergman Y Robert Rossellini it is an activity sprinkler.
Now spin with ‘Darwin’s Sourire’a monologue directed by Muriel Mayette-Holtz that this Sunday and Monday anchors in the Akademia Theater –where he already offered ‘Link Link Circus’– to ‘celebrate’ the patron’s birthday Elsa Perettideceased in 2021.
Ethology and theater. Strange union of interests.
At the age of 58, after working all my life as a model and actress, I went back to university and got a master’s degree in ethology, a discipline that had interested me since, at the age of 13, my father gave me the book ‘The ring of King Solomon’, by Konrad Lorenz. I joined interests writing texts in a comic key for short films…
What ‘Green Porn’on sexuality in the animal kingdom.
And now I bring them together in ‘Le sourire de Darwin’, which starts from the reading of ‘The expression of emotions in man and animals’ (1872), where the naturalist wonders if they are the product of evolution.
What would an ethologist explain about Isabella Rossellini?
Ethology is the science that studies the behavior of animals.
It was a figurative question.
I don’t know what to answer him. I am me, and I do things that fascinate me. I take care of my family, of the animals, I turn my experience into a text, I show it in a show… That’s my description.
“I am me, and I do things that fascinate me”
They described her as “the most beautiful woman in the world”.
Flattering. It benefited me when working as a model and actress. It allowed me to be financially independent and manage my career. But I am 70 years old.
Darwin wrote that the function of beauty is sexual. Has it been a curse?
I understand that young women of 20 or 30 years old fight to win rights. In the 1970s I also defended them in an Italy where women were always available, there was no divorce and ‘honor killings’ existed (men could avenge adultery). There are still many things to do for equality.
“My mother paid a high price for seeking independence”
Ingrid Bergman was a champion of emancipation, and she was highly questioned.
It is a tremendous example of the quest for independence, and it paid a huge price. They did not allow her daughter Pía to see her for eight years and they cut her career short in the United States after she married my father, with whom she fell in love while she was married.
Did you not suffer their absences?
It was very present in my childhood. She escaped from filming to see us, we went to visit her. Being a working woman was a great example.
Have you discovered any secrets about her lately?
No. He wrote an autobiography [‘Mi historia’] and recounted other things in letters and diaries that the family has deposited at Western University. In one of the diaries, for example, he describes his experience during the filming of ‘Casablanca’.
“I’ve seen ‘Casablanca’ about thirty times, but I don’t recognize mom”
How many times have you seen that classic?
At least thirty. But in ‘Casablanca’ he didn’t identify mom, he was too young. Instead, I have difficulty seeing it in ‘Autumn Sonata’, the Ingmar Bergman film shot three years before his death, because it is the mother I remember. It still hurts me to hear her voice.
She defined herself as “spiritual, irritating, stubborn and wild”.
I don’t know where he got that from.
From a youth diary. I just wanted to know how you would describe it.
It wasn’t wild at all! He was a wonderful being. A very responsible woman, with many difficulties in combining motherhood with her career.
His smile is very similar to hers.
If you say so. Emotions are necessary to survive. Some are acquired and others are innate. Perhaps because I was born in Italy I gesture a lot with my hands, but I don’t smile or cry in the Italian way, but like all men and women in the world.
“I don’t know which way the world is going”
Do you like the world that has touched you?
If I didn’t belong to it, I would still wear a plaster corset [sufrió una escoliosis severa en la infancia]and would be more oppressed as a woman.
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However, it does not improve the species. There is the war in the Ukraine.
Humanity has suffered enormous tragedies. My parents lived through two world wars. I deplore what is happening in Ukraine. But I don’t know which way the world is going, honestly.