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.

She doesn’t know if age has lost her the Lancôme contract. ‘You will have to ask them…’ But it’s not the first time she’d heard of 40 – for a woman – signalling it was time to down tools. ‘Generally I am asked about women after 40 and if they can work. Not only do I believe they can work; they do work.’ She still worked for Dolce & Gabbana and Donna Karan. ‘I think there is a yearn in people to see somebody who defines beauty and elegance after 40 and I regret that Lancôme – if that is the reason [they dropped me] – did not see that.’

According to novelist Ian McEwan, who wrote the screenplay for Rossellini’s film, The Innocent, on set she was ‘fun’ but ‘suffered from people gawping at her’. Would a few wrinkles, our man asked, ‘be welcome if only to take the edge off her looks?’ ‘Well they do come,’ she replied. Reminded that her mother, Ingrid Bergman, did not rule out a facelift, she herself is not against them ‘in principle’. But she wondered ‘if you shouldn’t have the courage to say: This is what a woman looks like at 45.’