Name: Isabella Rossellini Had A Wild Childhood | Letterman
Uploaded: 2023-08-03T22:00:27.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Isabella Rossellini Had A Wild Childhood | Letterman' from Letterman on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-08-03. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Isabella Rossellini Had A Wild Childhood | Letterman' from Letterman on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-08-03. Transcript available.

My next guest, first guest tonight, has often been called one of the most
beautiful women in the world.
And with that in mind, you can understand why she is also one of the most
successful models in the world.
It's a pleasure to welcome Isabella Rossellini.
Hi, Isabella, how are you?
Nice to see you.
Thank you very much for being here. Welcome to the show.
Thank you.
Did that embarrass you, the way we introduced you as one of the most beautiful
women in the world?
Do you get embarrassed by that?
It's always a little bit embarrassing because I'm not sure everybody thinks the
same thing.
Well, it seems to be pretty much a consensus.
Thank you.
I don't know.
Now, you have a kind of a thing on your tooth there, don't you?
Yes.
You have a chipped tooth.
I do.
Now, some people...
See how beautiful I am.
That's how it starts.
But it doesn't bother you that that's chipped a little bit, is it?
Well, it bothered me when my brother threw the telephone at me and broke my
tooth.
That was...
Why did your brother throw the telephone at you?
Because he was young.
He didn't do it like now.
But we were many kids.
I grew up with my father, was married.
Besides, my mother had other wives and other kids.
So we were seven altogether.
And we always had friends and cousins.
And we were really a very large group of children.
And sometimes it got very rough.
So do you remember the issue that you and your brother were fighting over?
We fought over many things.
I forgot that one.
I think it was...
I forgot what it really was.
I mean, we were always separating and creating gangs and fighting each other.
That was our fun game.
Yeah, well, sure.
Nasty kids.
Chipped tooth is a lot of fun, isn't it?
That was fun.
Have you ever...
Has anybody ever said,
Well, if you're going to continue in modeling,
you better get that thing leveled off or filed or whatever they do to them?
Yes, they just...
Well, they don't...
They haven't complained much.
You know, they haven't.
Only recently, people have been noticing my tooth.
I don't know.
Maybe because they say I'm so beautiful that I start looking for all the
mistakes.
Did you have a...
You mentioned there were a lot of people in your family when you were a kid.
Did you have a strange childhood?
And I don't mean that to be offensive,
but was it odd and peculiar and...
And I think...
I thought it was normal, naturally, when I grew up.
And now that I am a grown-up myself and I have a child and all that,
I do think that it was very unusual and it was very funny.
I don't know if it was my parents' capacity of letting us play as much as we
wanted it
or the fact that we were so many and that it couldn't handle us all.
But it was very wild.
We had all sorts of animals.
Any desire was fulfilled.
And I feel they also felt a little bit guilty that they were divorcing.
So everything we said came through to us.
So we were in a good end of the divorce.
I worked at animals and we had all sorts of animals, cats and dogs.
And Father once came up at the hotel where we were living.
You were in there divorced with a kangaroo.
We had a lion, a monkey, anything.
What would you do with a kangaroo?
Oh, he was nasty.
We couldn't keep him too long.
We kept him two days and he kicked a lot.
He was a baby kangaroo, but he was nasty.
So we, you know, we catched him and we put it back on the box where he came.
And my father had to travel all the way from Paris back to Rome where, you know,
somebody wanted it for the zoo.
The Paris Zoo didn't want a kangaroo.
Well, the kangaroo eventually did get a good home.
Yes.
I don't know the zoo.
I don't know if he liked it so much.
Maybe he would have liked it to be with us, but he was too nasty.
The kangaroo was nasty, though.
We have to go away for a commercial, Isabella.
We'll be back here.
We'll return, folks.
So come on back.
We're back with Isabella Rossellini.
We mentioned your family and stuff.
We didn't mention your parents.
You had very famous people.
Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman were your mom and dad.
What was that like?
Did you know that these were big, big, important people?
No, I didn't know.
I mean, it was very confusing.
I think it's something that I'm still sort of learning and finding out.
But we knew so little about it that my older brother had a child, and the child
was three
years old.
He knew my mother's as grandma, naturally.
But he heard this name, Ingrid Bergman.
It was sort of a myth.
You know, the press was talking about it.
And he never realized that that was his grandmother.
And he had a teddy bear, and he called the teddy bear Ingrid Bergman.
And he pretended he was his son.
He didn't even know that Ingrid Bergman was a woman.
He pretended that Ingrid Bergman the bear was his son.
Was his son.
Right.
So we didn't know.
You got into modeling in kind of an unusual fashion, and late in life, I
believe, for what
is considered the norm for models.
How did it happen?
It happened.
I have a friend, Frances Grill, and she just opened about two years ago a model
agency
called Click, and she only had boys.
And she wanted to start it, you know, with the girls.
And she asked me, some of the photographers, they knew her.
They wanted to take pictures of me.
And at the time, I was working as a journalist.
And we did it.
But, you know, then my third job, my third appointment, was one of the cover of
Vogue.
And then, you know, it started a big career.
No kidding.
So they just asked you if they could photograph you for the heck of it, or they
wanted you
to...
Yes, well, I don't...
You never considered it before?
No, I thought it was stupid.
I wanted to be intelligent.
I thought that job, I'm not going to do.
You thought modeling was being stupid.
Yes, right.
And is it, do you think, now that you're doing it?
No, I don't know.
No, I don't think so.
No, I really don't think so.
I think I was stupid by thinking that a job makes you stupid, you know.
Do you have plans to go from modeling into acting?
Yes, I'm asked.
And I'm always so...
About acting, I mean, I feel...
I have both feeling of feeling very appeal to it, and also feel scared, because
I like
to play, and I like games, and I like to do things for fun, and I always feel
that I'm
successful when I approach things like that.
But acting, because of my mother and because of my father, it just looked upon
me like,
oh, this is going to be serious.
Yeah, well, there would be extra pressure on you, I'm sure, because of those
two feet.
Yeah, it's a little bit scary.
But, oh, it's fun.
It's a nice job.
Are you close to being in a film?
Have you done some film work?
I've done some film work in Italy, but, you know, with friends, and so it was
very different.
And, you know, starting a big career, and trying to make it with big people.
Do people confuse you at all with Nastassia Kinski in prints, photographs?
They do, they do, yes.
They do in print, photographs.
The cover of Vogue, sometimes I think it's Nastassia, and it's me, or sometimes
it's Nastassia.
But I always say it's me, so it feels like I have more and more cover.
You might as well take credit for her career.
You look so beautiful, I say, yeah, it's always me.
If you're just starting out, what the heck, get a credit wherever you can.
Well, good luck.
If you want to go into films, I would look forward to that.
Good luck to you.
Thank you.
And thank you very much for being here.
Thank you very much.
Isabella Rossellini, folks.
We'll be right back with Sisto and Ebert after you take a look at a great
applause for station identification.