Owning your wrinkles ... and your life.

"How do I fully realize myself?"

Isabella Rossellini for the New York Times, 2024.

I have to admit it: When I saw the headline in the New York Times, “How to Grow Old Like Isabella Rossellini,” I snorted.

Really? What could the sophisticated model, actress and current organic farmer ever have to teach me about growing older? After all, when your mother is Ingrid Bergman and your father is Roberto Rossellini, when you’ve been married to Martin Scorsese and partnered with David Lynch, and when you’ve done a series of short films about animals’ sex lives called Green Porno, it’s easy to assume we have nothing in common.

Then I looked closer, and remembered why I’ve always liked her so much.

But first, a story.

When I was just out of college in the early 1980s, I was lucky enough to be an editor at various women’s magazines in New York City during their last, best season. I started as an Assistant Editor at McCall’s (one of the famed Seven Sisters magazines, now, unfortunately, deceased), jumped to a slightly better editorial job at Seventeen (the experience was awful, though I’d loved the magazine for years) and ended up as the Managing Editor of Health magazine just as topics like breast cancer activism and the benefits of high-impact aerobics were becoming mainstream.

At Health, at least during the time I was there, the cover always featured a celebrity, and I had a blast jetting to California or taxiing downtown with the magazine’s art director to supervise photo shoots and conduct interviews.

Some of the photos we printed were of women who were truly amazing looking by photographers who worked magic in their Tribeca or Santa Monica studios. We did photo shoots with Diane Keaton, Chris Evert and Jacqueline Bisset, among others.

But I also learned from experience and close inspection how a photographer, using light, shadow and retouching, could make a mediocre photo of a model or celebrity who wasn’t having her best day look glowy and beautiful. Remember, this was before just any princess could alter a photo using just her iPhone.

Once I saw what a skilled photo retoucher could do, I never looked at a magazine cover photo, a makeup ad or a picture of any woman in a bathing suit quite the same way again.

Which brings me back to Isabella Rossellini, now 71.

When I was in my salad days as a baby magazine editor, she was the luminous face of Lancome cosmetics. She even helped them choose the scent for the popular perfume she helped sell, Tresor.

Isabella Rossellini in her (earlier) Lancome days. See what I mean about photo retouching? No woman actually looks like this, even Isabella.

Then, at 43, Lancome fired her for being too old. And she began to reckon with what, if we are very lucky, we all have to contemplate: Who am I, and how do I fulfill the rest of my life?

She kept acting, and began, as she told Lulu Garcia-Navarro from the New York Times, diligently following her curiosity.

“You know, I didn’t have a master plan. I just followed my curiosity diligently: getting up early and finding time to really study or to write. So I was diligent, like the good girl that we are taught to be. But, you know, I’m curious about all the questions you are asking me. Because I have a feeling it has to do with women. We are asking, How do we find our voice? And I feel in your question, the question to me, but it’s a question that you ask yourself: How do I fully realize myself?”

She had always been fascinated by ethology, or the study of animal behavior, so she decided to go back to school and learn more about it. She bought a small farm in Bellport, New York, where she tends sheep; there’s a knitwear line she models using their wool. She wrote a book. She kept acting. Financial independence has been a driving factor in her life.

Then, when she was in her 60s, Lancome, now run by a woman, called her back and she became a global brand ambassador.

The best part, to me, though, is how Rossellini has embraced how she actually looks, wrinkles and all. It’s something that is difficult for us mere mortals, forget about former international models. Last year, she was photographed for the covers of Elle and Vogue Italia and insisted that the photos not be retouched.

Here’s my favorite, a photo of Rossellini in a chunky knit hat made from the wool of the sheep she raises on her farm.

As Rossellini told Vogue Italia:

“This is precisely what I ask of fashion and cosmetics. I find it very reductive to appear younger than my age and, in any case, it’s a losing battle. … The new generations are looking for more modern and intelligent definitions of beauty.”

Viva, Isabella.