Just shy of her 42nd birthday, Lancôme dumped Isabella Rossellini, the world’s best-paid model and screen actor. Dumped? Well, they said that, two years hence, they ‘would not be renewing her $2m-a-year contract as its exclusive spokesmodel’. It had been a 14-year gig. ‘The caesura became a cause célèbre, a fable on the theme of ageism,’ wrote Andrew Billen in the Observer of 12 June 1994. Ironic that she had been ‘sacked for the grooves round her neck by a company whose promise is that age cannot wither you,’ he noted. It didn’t wither Cleopatra and she didn’t even wear face cream. But Rossellini’s youth ticket wasn’t skin unguents but her imperfect mastery of English idiom which, having been brought up in Rome and then living in Manhattan, ‘is stuck at a rather fetching 90%’. She ‘looks and sounds a sophisticated 27,’ remarked our man. Hard to believe, apparently, that she was ‘the twice-divorced mother of an 11-year-old’. Martin Scorsese was an ex-husband, David Lynch, ‘who persuaded her to do the most extraordinary things in Blue Velvet’, an ex live-in boyfriend.
