Isabella Rossellini was able to both divorce Martin Scorsese and marry Jonathan Wiedemann all in the same day. In fact, it took only a half an hour to get everything finished, on a quick jaunt to Santo Domingo. The marriage was not important for Rossellini herself, but Wiedemann’s family wanted it, and Lancôme could have canceled their partnership if she did not walk down the aisle.
“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,” she explained to the Los Angeles Times.
The couple stayed together for less than a year after their 1983 wedding, although they did not technically divorce until 1986. For Rossellini, this was simply confirmation that marriage was not her jam. “It’s quite common among Europeans not to get married and to live together,” she said in a different Los Angeles Times piece. “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.”
