Her romantic life too was built around the movies. She was married to Martin Scorsese in 1979. They divorced in the early '80s when Rossellini fell for model Jon Wiedemann. They married and gave birth to daughter Elettra. David Lynch rolled into her life and cast her as the bruised torch singer in 1986's Blue Velvet. She was briefly enmeshed with Gary Oldman at the tail end of his hard-drinking days. The press soaked up all her romances and wrung them out on the gossip pages. (''Now that I'm older, they don't care so much who I go out with or who's my lover,'' she says.)
Her real love affair, though, has always been with the avant-garde, the experimental filmmakers that remind her of her dad: ''When I meet them I feel immediately like it's family.'' Such was the case with Canadian cult figure Guy Maddin (Tales From the Gimli Hospital). In early 2003, after she read the script for Saddest Music -- a dreamy swirl of a movie set in Depression-era Winnipeg, where Rossellini's character presides over an international search for the saddest music in the world -- Rossellini went up to meet Maddin in his Winnipeg house. The two hung out for hours, poring through the director's flea-market finds and listening to '30s music. Together they came up with the idea that her character would be the love child of silent-film star Lon Chaney and Cruella De Vil. ''I was inspired by these early silent Italian diva movies,'' says Maddin. ''The whole movie would come to a halt whenever the star came out and struck a pose. People would just throw themselves down at the feet of these divas to be destroyed. And it was wonderful. Isabella can strike a pose like that.'' The two may join forces again on a biopic of Roberto Rossellini. ''A love letter to my dad as a filmmaker,'' she says.
Meanwhile, Rossellini is having a gas with director J.J. Abrams and the Alias crew. ''I don't see any difference between them and Maddin,'' she says approvingly. ''They are as mad!'' Abrams, who promises that the finale leaves open the possibility of her return next season, is besotted: ''First of all, Isabella is an incredible actor, and she's beautiful, she's charming, she's funny. She's just the coolest.''
Today, Rossellini lives in New York with her 10-year-old adopted son, Roberto. Elettra, a 20-year-old model living in Milan, just turned down her first film. ''I did the same thing until I was 30,'' sighs Rossellini, ''so there's always a chance to change your mind. But it's hard to go into that with the entire world saying 'Are you going to be as good as your grandmother?'''
As she hoists a black JanSport backpack onto her shoulder, ready to head home for a quick bite before that night's curtain call, she asks for a review of Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. ''Do you think I can take my son? What does it have that it has R? Like a 'f -- -' here or a 'f -- -' there? He can take that. He's from New York.'' Her schedule doesn't leave much time for movies these days, but she swooned for Sofia Coppola's mood piece Lost in Translation. ''It was my life in advertising,'' she says. ''I told Sofia that she made my biography. I would love to work with her.''
