MOVIES : Building the Model Actress : It hasn’t been easy, despite her high-profile parents and a tendency to surround herself with talented men. But with her first leading role behind her, Isabella Rosellini finally feels some confidence as an actress

“I’ve been reluctant to take myself seriously as an actress,” admits Isabella Rossellini, “and that’s probably because of who my parents were, and because of the wonderfully talented people like Martin Scorsese and David Lynch who’ve surrounded my life. I felt I was expected to have a career as big as theirs, and that was difficult for me to get past.

“It wasn’t until recently that I began to feel I know something of the craft of acting, and though I still have a lot to learn, I think I’ve made progress,” adds the 41-year-old actress, who has her first leading role in “The Innocent,” John Schlesinger’s political thriller set against the backdrop of World War II, which opens next month.

“Working with John Schlesinger was a breakthrough for me because he told me I was a good actress and somehow made me believe him,” adds Rossellini, who co-stars with Anthony Hopkins and Campbell Scott in the film. “He was able to convince me because John is very fatherly, and if daddy tells you something then it must be true,” she laughs.

The director of such critically acclaimed films as “Midnight Cowboy” and “Far From the Madding Crowd,” Schlesinger admits to being “a little concerned about whether Isabella would be able to handle the role during early rehearsals for the film, because she seemed curiously withheld.

“But an indefinable alchemy happened between her and me, and one day we had an extraordinary breakthrough session--from then on my confidence in her was total. I don’t often say this about my own films, but I think she’s remarkable in the part.”

If Rossellini’s pedigreed bloodlines made her reluctant to jump into acting feet first--she is the daughter of actress Ingrid Bergman and Italian filmmaker Roberto Rossellini--her extraordinary beauty posed a bit of a problem too. Best known as the signature face of the Lancome cosmetics line, Rossellini worked as a model before breaking into film, and everybody knows models can’t do anything but be beautiful.

“When you start out as a model and then become an actress, it’s always held against you,” points out Joel Schumacher, who directed Rossellini in the 1989 film “Cousins.” “People assume great beauties aren’t as intelligent or as deep, and there seems to be a desperate need to find the fatal flaw in every beautiful woman.

“But women like Isabella are rare--she’s a very accessible beauty and is human and down to earth. She’s already turned in some tremendous performances--she was amazing in ‘Blue Velvet,’ for instance--and I think she has yet to do her best work.”

Rossellini herself scoffs at the idea that her beauty has been a problem in her pursuit of an acting career. “I’m losing my beauty,” laughs Rossellini, who can also be seen this summer in Lawrence Kasdan’s “Wyatt Earp,” “so it doesn’t get in the way at all. I’m 41 and although I may have the beauty of a 41-year-old woman, that’s not the kind of beauty that’s celebrated in this culture.”

Of her role in Wyatt Earp, Rossellini explains: “I play Doc Holiday’s girlfriend Big Nose Kate, who was one of the ugliest creatures I’ve ever seen--she’s lucky they just picked on her nose,” she laughs. “She was a Hungarian woman, stocky and strong, and she looked like a man. When I saw a photo of her I asked Larry Kasdan if he wanted me to wear a mask with a fake nose and he said, ‘It’s not important that you look like her--what’s important is that you convey the violence of her relationship with Doc Holiday.’ ”

Rossellini’s being a bit disingenuous in saying she’s losing her looks--she’s still a stunningly attractive woman; moreover, women of a certain age are currently making unprecedented inroads in the beauty industry. Briefly in L.A. to tend to some odds and ends of business, she meets a reporter in a hotel room, and upon entering the suite exclaims, “Everywhere I go this cart of hors d’oeuvres seems to follow me.” An unpretentious woman with a bawdy sense of humor, a hearty, barnyard laugh and the physical elegance of an aristocrat, she’s a wonderful juxtaposition of opposites. And she is recognizably the daughter of Ingrid Bergman--like her mother, she exudes a luminous grace one rarely sees in movie stars.

Growing up surrounded by famous movie people, however, left Rossellini decidedly ambivalent about the profession. “There’s always been a part of me that’s very angry with film,” she confesses, “because film took away my parents, my lovers, my husbands. It took them away on trips, to other lovers, to other families, so my relationship to movies is very personal and complicated.”

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Born in Rome in 1952 a few seconds before her twin sister, Pia, arrived, Rossellini moved to Paris with her family at age 3, and spent her childhood and adolescence shuttling between her parents, who divorced when she was quite young, in Paris, Rome and later, London.

“When I think of myself as a child, the image that comes to mind is dirt--I was a very busy child and I was always dirty, spotted and stained,” she recalls. “We lived mostly in hotels because my parents were always on the road, and I didn’t know that was strange, or that I led a privileged life. I wasn’t aware my parents were special, and never knew how famous they were. I remember being at school and asking my friend, ‘Is my mother as famous as Joan Crawford? How about Greta Garbo?’ I had little understanding of any of this.

“My father worried about the prospect of me becoming an actress because there’s very little work in Europe and the film industry there is in bad shape,” she says. “And, I grew up well aware that my mother was persecuted by the U.S. film industry--she suffered and I knew it. (Ingrid Bergman was blackballed from Hollywood after giving birth to Rossellini’s older brother, Roberto, out of wedlock, in 1949.) “I was too little to read the papers at the time, but she’d tell me what they wrote, and I remember her being very sad and frightened about it. Famous people get away with more, but more is expected of them too, and though people say to me, ‘What happened to your mother could never happen in America now,’ I see it happening all the time.

“Growing up I didn’t see a lot of movies,” she adds. “I probably saw more movies than factories, but I wasn’t dazzled by movies and never felt, ‘This is a world I must enter.’ It’s different in Europe, of course. Hollywood is glamorous and revolves around the notion of stardom. In Europe, film is a more intellectual art form, and that was very much the way my father, who was an extremely cultured man, related to it.”

At the age of 18 Rossellini enrolled at Finch College in New York, where she found work translating and teaching Italian. That led to a job as a production assistant for Italian television, where she worked her way up to a job as correspondent for an entertainment program for RAI, the Italian state television. From there she went on to become the straight man for Italian comedian Roberto Begnini on a comedy show called “L’altra Domenica.”

Returning to television journalism after the taste of fame she’d experienced with Begnini left Rossellini despondent and bored, and her fathers’ death in 1977 was a hugely traumatic event for her. “I’ve always felt that the dividing line in the history of my life is the day my father died,” says Rossellini, who later lost her mother to breast cancer in 1982. “That was the day I had to become an adult and had to accept that if I was upset or frightened, I just had to live with it.”

Life was to take a dramatic upward turn for Rossellini two years later; in 1979 she married director Martin Scorsese, and the following year Bruce Weber photographed her for British Vogue and her modeling career took off. Rossellini had already done a bit of acting at that point--in 1977 she appeared in “The Meadow,” a movie directed by Italian filmmakers the Taviani brothers--but acting was the last thing on her mind in the early ‘80s.

“Working with the Tavianis didn’t make me feel like an actress because they use people who aren’t professional actors in their films. This is done quite a lot in Europe, where people are often cast for what they emanate as people--for their ‘aura,’ or whatever you want to call it. I was hired for that--I wasn’t hired to act.

“Moreover, I didn’t want to work as an actress during the years I was married to Marty,” she adds. “People offered me parts at the time, but no husband would encourage his wife to be an actress because that means you’re gone all the time. People have said that Marty wouldn’t let me work as an actress, but I never felt that--his attitude was an act of love. He told me, ‘You don’t need to do it--I’ll take care of you.’ ”

By the time Rossellini and Scorsese divorced in 1983, she’d already been signed as the spokesperson for Lancome, so she was well equipped to take care of herself. The year of her divorce she married model Jonathan Wiedemann, with whom she had a daughter the following year. That marriage too was to end in divorce after barely a year.

“I don’t know why it’s so hard to keep a relationship together,” says Rossellini. “It’s sad, but passion does fade, temptation comes in and at a certain point you decide to follow the new thing. And let’s face it, men are more subject to this than women are, and are by nature more polygamous than women. If it was up to me, I would never divorce--I was always left.”

Following her second divorce, Rossellini decided to try her hand at acting again, and was cast opposite Mikhail Baryshnikov in the 1985 film “White Nights.” The following year she landed the part of battered femme fatale Dorothy Vallens in David Lynch’s dark masterpiece, “Blue Velvet,” and turned in her most critically acclaimed performance to date.

“I had an intuitive understanding of this woman--the minute I read the script I knew who she was and wanted to play her,” she recalls.

“When the film was first released, however, I felt tremendous guilt,” she continues. “Today ‘Blue Velvet’ is considered a classic, but when it first came out, it was quite controversial. It was released in Italy by a bad distributor who promoted it as semi-porn, and the publicity generated by the film centered on the idea that Ingrid Bergman’s daughter couldn’t make it as a legitimate actress so she became a porno star. The Venice Film Festival refused to screen it on the grounds of defending my parents reputation, and I felt like a total failure. If the film was praised, David Lynch and Dennis Hopper were praised, but if people didn’t like it, I was attacked. They said it was a misogynist film that trashed my Lancome image.”

Though the release of “Blue Velvet” was a rough ride for Rossellini, her being cast in the film led to a four-year relationship with Lynch, and parts in several more films. In 1987 she had small roles in Mary Lambert’s “Siesta,” and Norman Mailer’s “Tough Guys Don’t Dance,” in 1988 she starred opposite David Lynch in Tina Rathborne’s “Zelly and Me,” in 1989 she did “Cousins,” and in 1990 had a small part in Lynch’s “Wild at Heart.” In 1992 she tried her hand at comedy in “Death Becomes Her,” and last year she turned in a well-received performance in the Peter Weir film, “Fearless.”

Though her ambivalence about film is less marked than it once was, Rossellini takes issue with many aspects of her work.

“There’s a problem with film and I’ll tell you what it is,” she declares. “I recently had dinner with the Greek writer Oriana Fallaci, a nasty lady who’s one of my best friends. Nobody sees her but me, and we have long dinners and talk about life. She told me a writer recently completed a biography about her that revolved around a love affair she’d had, and that annoyed her. Love wasn’t the engine of her life, she told me, nor was war or justice--a sense of adventure is what drove her. When she said that, I realized it was true for me too.

“This is the attitude of a mature woman and it’s not something you often see in film, which focuses on romantic love as the most important thing in a woman’s life,” she continues. “Menopause is a great blessing because it releases women from the question: should I get married and have a baby? At that point you start asking, what else is there? I don’t yearn to be married, and though I can’t say being single is my favorite state, I’m not lonely and would rather be single than be in many of the relationships I see.”

Rossellini currently lives in New York, where she is raising her 10-year-old daughter Elettra, and her 9-month-old son Roberto, a mixed race child she adopted last fall. When one comments that adopting Roberto was a wonderful thing for her to do, she says, “I guess so. Everyone reacts like that, which surprises me. It’s a lot of work in the beginning, but then it’s really fun.”

Rossellini will have a bit more time for her children next year, when her contract with Lancome expires. “I’m sorry to see the relationship end, because I’ve grown attached to the company and we work well together,” she says. “It’s more their choice than mine to end our work together--I’ve represented Lancome for 14 years, and I guess I did my job so well that they now feel the need to separate their identity from me.

“Working for Lancome has been great fun for me, although it involves discipline,” she points out. “A week before a shoot you feel a certain pressure--obviously I can’t gain ten pounds, get a tan, or get drunk the night before the shoot. But these pictures are designed to be about an emotion rather than a blueprint for physical beauty. The Lancome woman is me when I feel fulfilled, calm and relaxed.”

Though Rossellini regrets the termination of her relationship with Lancome, she accepts it--as she seems to accept most things--with good-natured resignation.

“I’m fatalistic and believe you can’t get what you want in life--I know there are many things I want that I’ll never be able to have,” she concludes. “You just have to resign yourself to that fact, and once you stop focusing on some imagined goal you begin to see what’s around you. And at that point, life begins to seem very rich.”