Isabella Rossellini was one of the twin daughters born to actress Ingrid Bergman and director Roberto Rossellini in 1952. After growing up in Italy, she came to America at 19, where she studied at Finch College and the New School for Social Research. She then returned to Rome, where she worked as a translator and TV journalist (not unlike her New York-based half-sister Pia Lindstrom). Just for the fun of it, Rossellini made her first film appearance in 1976, playing a bit in her mother's film A Matter of Time. She found acting to her liking, appearing in several European TV dramas before her first big-screen starring role in 1979's The Meadow. In the early 1980s, Rossellini put her film activities on the back burner to concentrate on her modelling career on behalf of Lancome Cosmetics. After her first marriage to Hollywood director Martin Scorsese broke up in 1983, she inaugurated a relationship with ballet star Mikhail Baryshnikov, with whom she co-starred in White Night (1985). Her next amour was filmmaker David Lynch, who cast her in her breakthrough role as a much-abused small-town nightclub singer in Blue Velvet (1986). Rossellini's other romantic partners have included her second husband John Wiedeman (the father of her daughter Electra) and actor Gary Oldman. Isabella Rossellini has continued seeking out offbeat, challenging film roles into the 1990s: most recently she was seen as Anna Maria Ermody in the controversial Beethoven biopic Immortal Beloved and as no-nonsense frontierswoman Big Nose Kate in Wyatt Earp (both 1994).