In June 1977, the acclaimed director succumbed to a cardiac arrest at his residence in Rome, only days after serving as jury president for the Cannes Film Festival. His daughter Isabella Rossellini, then in her twenties, recalls her mother, the Hollywood star, remarking: “Father left us quickly, just as fast as he drove his Ferrari.”
The account of Roberto’s final twenty years is told in the documentary Living Without a Script, a new archival documentary that premieres this week in Rome. While the film serves as a reminder to its subject’s reputation as one of the icons of international film—the central force in Italian neorealism after the war—it also depicts his existence beyond cinema.
In the documentary, the director appears perpetually on the move: racing cars, researching science, and experimenting with television—a format that he welcomed (unlike most of his contemporaries).
Rossellini speaks from her property in Long Island, NY, with her golden retriever, Rosie, making periodic cameos on camera. In person—as in the media, on the stage, or on online platforms—Isabella is warm, open, and unreserved. Such honesty feels especially striking given the painful intrusions into their private affairs that her relatives have endured—and the new film emphasizes.
“As my mother and father began their relationship, they were wed to different partners and so that caused a massive scandal,” notes Rossellini. “My mum was a film icon but not an American citizen, and she was barred back to the United States.” This remark is matter-of-fact, as if Bergman’s terrible public disgrace and exile were merely a immigration issue. In reality, Isabella’s parents’ relationship was a significant tabloid event of the 1950s.
They first met after she sent a letter to him in 1948, praising his film Open City and asking if he might think about working with her, mentioning her language abilities in an effort to convince him. “Should you require a Swedish actress who knows the English language very well,” she wrote, “who remembers her Deutsch, who is not very understandable in the French language, and who in the Italian tongue knows only ti amo, I’m prepared to come and make a film with you.”
Each wed (with kids) at the period, Roberto to a costume designer and she to a neurosurgeon, they began an affair on the production of Stromboli terra di Dio (1950) and she became expecting with their eldest, their son.
While extramarital relationships were seen as relatively common for male European directors nearing fifty, they were deemed unacceptable for a female star whose impeccable public image was established in the classic film in the war years, and Joan of Arc (1948). “I’m just a woman,” said Bergman of the backlash, which found her ostracized by studios and even criticized in the American government, when the Colorado senator Edwin C Johnson spoke publicly and suggested a bill where movies would be approved based on the perceived ethics of their stars.
Bergman “committed an offense upon the sanctity of wedlock,” stated the senator in an emotional speech. He added that Bergman—who had formerly been his favourite actor—was a “vile free-love cultist” and “a powerful influence for evil.” Bergman stayed in Europe for most of the next decade, delivering to Isabella and her sibling, Isotta, in the early fifties, while being barred from visiting her first child, Pia, after an acrimonious legal dispute with her former husband, Lindström.
Isabella scotches any notion that her father was absent or inattentive during her youth. In the summer holidays, he would rent a villa on the Italian coastline, where all the family would gather, and in spite of ongoing hostility from audiences and the media, the various children all got along. “I didn’t perceive the distinction between a full brother and a half-brother. When we had to resume classes, we would all head to the homes where the mothers were but, in the holidays, we were all together.”
Home life, however, sounded complex, with Bergman and Roberto’s three children—then eight and six years old—living in their own apartment with a nanny and a housekeeper, and visits from both parents. “Mother would stay over with us,” recalls Isabella, “but would also return to Paris where she was remarried. Father resided close by with his new wife.”
Nonetheless, Isabella emphasizes the “ongoing involvement” of her father, whose fame was a surprise to his child. “Initially, when I was little,” she explains, “I thought all parents was famous just by merit of being a mother or father. Then I understood that my parents were recognised by people they didn’t know, while my friends’ parents were not recognised. It was a gradual realization.”
Similarly her appreciation of their contributions in cinema. Affected by his disillusion with the film business, and struggling to obtain versions, she didn’t see any of her father’s movies until she was 16, when she snuck off to a Rossellini film series in Rome. “I went daily to see my father’s films but I didn’t tell him. Dad was constantly grumbling about events, conversations, promoting films and red carpets—that sort of spectacle. He felt annoyed with fans and everything. So when I decided to see his work, I did it secretly.”
When she eventually told him, “I remember his face crumbling and the tears in his eyes. He was actually very touched.” From that point, she’s steeped herself in his oeuvre, and is especially admiring of Journey to Italy, with Ingrid Bergman and the actor as a quarrelling English couple on vacation.
“It was a contemporary and more complicated way to portray a husband and wife with this harshness that isn’t overt,” she says. “Among the most touching scenes for me is when my mother goes to Pompeii like a tourist, but then, when she sees the historic pair buried in the eruption debris she bursts into tears because she sees affection and she encounters death.”
Rossellini recalls how the film was disapproved of on its release in the mid-fifties (the New York Times failed to cover it.). Through their short-lived union, Roberto was doubtful when Bergman got overtures of roles from different filmmakers, and largely discouraged her from collaborating with anyone but himself. She subsequently stated that she did not excuse him for this, but their daughter defends her dad, claiming his advice was motivated by a desire to shield. “He didn’t want to work once more with America,” she says. “Also, they were fearful. There was political persecution; they had death threats. Moreover, “they had three kids and five films. So they were quite busy.”
When Rossellini departed for the subcontinent, Ingrid accepted the leading role in the film Anastasia
Elara is a financial strategist with over a decade of experience in wealth management and entrepreneurship.
