4 April 2011

Take Three @ TFE: Isabella Rossellini

This week my "Take Three" column (every Sunday, three write-ups on three performances in a supporting/character actor's career) over at The Film Experience features Isabella Rossellini.


Take One: Blue Velvet (1986) “She... Wore... Bluuuuuue Vel-vet.” Indeed she did: bluer than velvet was the night. Ladies and gentlemen, Rossellini was the Blue Lady, Miss Dorothy Vallens, in David Lynch’s mid-eighties masterpiece Blue Velvet. Vallens was a tortured torch singer, a gas-guzzling freakopath Frank Booth’s (Dennis Hopper) late-night inviter and pervy amateur detective Jeffrey Beaumont’s (Kyle MacLachlan) sexual initiation vixen. And yet, behind it all, lay a fretful wife and mother. Rossellini’s introductory scene in the film showed her as a midnight siren, a depressed blue dahlia who, once done with her sad, strange rendition of Bobby Vinton’s titular song, seems to dematerialise into a pair of Lynch’s signature red curtains...

Read the rest here

2 comments:

  1. My dad has the biggest crush of all time with Isabella and he was the one who first made me watch "Blue Velvet", he literally rented it, brought it home and told me "watch this".
    I think she's vastly underrated as an actress, even if she seems rather limited in a way. Lovely post. Most recently I loved her work in "Alias".

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  2. Any dad who likes Blue Velvet is a good dad. She is rather underrated, isn't she. She does her thing with such style and has been good in a lot of films. Thanks for the kind words, Jose.

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