Isabella Rossellini’s Key Relationships Explored

Isabella Rossellini achieved a unique feat by divorcing Martin Scorsese and marrying Jonathan Wiedemann on the same day. This whirlwind change took just half an hour during a brief trip to Santo Domingo. While the marriage wasn’t particularly significant for Rossellini herself, it was important to Wiedemann’s family. Additionally, Lancôme, a major brand she was in partnership with, could have reconsidered their collaboration if she did not get married.

“To me, marriage didn’t mean a relationship, it meant a document, like your passport or a visa. When people were scandalized that I [was pregnant but] wasn’t married to Jonathan, I said, ‘So what?’ It was the moralistic Catholics of Italy who made me disrespect marriage, not my family,” Rossellini shared with the Los Angeles Times.

The couple remained together for less than a year after their 1983 wedding but did not officially divorce until 1986. For Rossellini, this was validation that marriage was not something she valued. “It’s quite common among Europeans not to get married and to live together,” she remarked in another Los Angeles Times interview. “In America people generally get married and divorced, stay together and split up, stay together and split up. I never thought I was going to get married. In fact, I only got married to Americans. Because they asked. Two weeks into dating them.”