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The two Ingrids, mama and twin, nursed Isabella through an agonizing two-year struggle with scoliosis, which began when she was 13 and threatened to deform her spine permanently. She was in a head-to-toe cast for much of the time, her sister recalls, "and we decided that if she could get through scoliosis as well as she did, she could get through anything." Ingrid was shy and scholarly as a child ("I did all our homework"), and Isabella, in her own words "a disaster in school," was sunny and adventurous. The twins, who are New York City neighbors, are still warm friends, and the rest of the crew of siblings and half-siblings remain close. "Now that the adults of the family are dead," says Isabella—Rossellini died suddenly of a heart attack in 1977, and Mama Ingrid last August after a long battle with cancer—"what makes me feel like an adult is working with the others to keep up the family visits and ceremonies."
Isabella married Film Director Martin Scorsese in September 1979, and they divorced last November, after prolonged separations caused by his career and her trips to London to visit her ailing mother. She had met Scorsese when she interviewed him for RAI-TV, the Italian state television system. She worked for RAI for several years, interviewing such diverse characters as Muhammad Ali and Barbra Streisand and appearing on a program she describes as a sort of Italian Saturday Night Live. "I was something of a star," she says, sounding a little surprised.
She had always, as an active feminist, felt that modeling created false values and expectations for women. Now, caught up in the challenges of her new career, Isabella has to some extent changed her opinion. "She works on each sitting as though it were an acting problem," says Avedon. And acting, he thinks, will be her next step. Possibly, but the words of parents hang heavy. Her father did not want her to become an actress, and her mother emphasized, perhaps too much, that to act well one had to feel a fierce passion for the art. Says Isabella: "My passion has always been infinitely controllable." She got good notices in her one serious film, a slow-moving Italian mood play called The Meadow (1982), by following her mother's advice. "She said that since I didn't have the tools yet, to keep it simple. 'Make a blank face,' she said, 'and the music and the story will fill it in.' " She did not understand acting enough to enjoy it then, she says. Now, like everyone else in show biz, she would like very much to see a good script.
In the meantime, she is joyously enthusiastic about being a new mother and a new wife. Her husband Jonathan Wiedemann, 25, is a tall, thin, redheaded Texan who two years ago graduated magna cum laude from Harvard, where he studied visual arts and political science. He is now working on a master's degree in film making at N.Y.U. and supports his movie habit by modeling. It was on a modeling shoot in Mexico 2½ years ago that he met Isabella. "After she and Marty split up, we became much closer," he says. "We fell in love, started a family and got married. I guess we mixed up the order a bit."