Motherhood Quote by Isabella Rossellini

There is a quiet sting in Rossellini's phrasing: "these same people" sketches an invisible jury, the critics and gossip-column moralists who police women’s reputations while pretending it’s just commentary. She’s not merely defending her mother; she’s diagnosing a cultural amnesia that conveniently edits women’s risk out of the story once their legacy becomes respectable.

The line works because it’s both intimate and tactical. Rossellini never names the mother (it’s hard not to hear Ingrid Bergman in the background), which lets the sentence travel beyond one famous scandal or one career. "Forget" is doing heavy lifting: it implies that the evidence is right there in the roles, the choices, the public record, yet the audience selectively blanks it out. That’s the subtext: people love daring women in retrospect, but they demand innocence in real time. They’ll praise a legend’s bravery decades later, while condemning the same behavior when it’s fresh.

"Mother also took a lot of chances" is plainspoken, almost domestic, which makes the rebuke sharper. She’s reframing "risk" not as recklessness but as creative agency: choosing complicated parts, stepping outside the approved script, refusing to be reduced to an icon of purity. The specific intent is corrective - a pushback against narratives that turn a woman’s career into a cautionary tale while granting men the glamour of experimentation. In a celebrity culture that rewards neat mythologies, Rossellini insists on the mess: greatness often looks like transgression up close.