“When I told him that I had secretly watched his films, his eyes filled with tears”: Isabella Rossellini remembers her father Roberto | film

IIn June 1977, Roberto Rossellini died suddenly of a heart attack at his home in Rome, less than a week after assuming the presidency of the Cannes Film Festival jury. The director’s daughter, Isabella – the fourth of his seven children – was in her mid-twenties. “Dad left us as quickly as he drove his Ferrari,” her mother, Ingrid Bergman, recalls.

The story of Roberto’s last two decades is told in Living Without a Text, a new archive-based documentary that premieres this week in Rome. While the film serves as a reminder of its subject’s status as one of the greats of world cinema—a key figure in post-war Italian neorealism—it also shows his life outside of the movies.

In the film, the director seems constantly on the move: racing cars, studying biology and physics, experimenting with television – a medium he has embraced (unlike most of his contemporaries).

Isabella speaks to me via video call from her farm on Long Island, New York, with her golden retriever, Rosie, occasionally appearing on screen. In person — as in the press, on the catwalk, or on social media — Isabella is warm, open, and unguarded. This candor seems all the more surprising given the horrific intrusions into their personal lives that her family endured – and that’s what the new film underscores.

“When my parents got together, they were married to other people, which created a very big scandal,” Isabella says, in a video call from Long Island, New York. “My mother was a Hollywood star but not an American citizen, and she was not allowed to return to America.” This statement is matter-of-fact, as if Bergman’s exposure and denial were merely an obstacle to a visa. In fact, Isabella’s parents’ relationship was a major tabloid event in the mid-20th century. They first met after she wrote to him in 1948, praising his film Open City and asking if he might consider working with her, citing her linguistic skills in an attempt to impress him. “If you need a Swedish actress who speaks English well, who has not forgotten her German, who understands little French, and who only knows Italian,” she wrote. Greetings to youI’m ready to come and make a movie with you.

They were both married (with children) at the time, he to a fashion designer and she to a neurosurgeon. They began an affair on the set of Stromboli terra di Dio (1950) and she became pregnant with their first child, Robin.

While extramarital affairs were seen as somewhat de rigueur for European male directors approaching fifty, they were considered out of the ordinary for a star whose impeccable public image had emerged in 1942’s Casablanca and Joan of Arc (1948). “I’m just a woman, another human being,” Bergman said in reference to the uproar and even smashing of studios in the US Senate, when Colorado Senator Edwin C. Johnson took the floor and proposed a bill that would allow films to be licensed based on the perceived morality of their stars.

Johnson said in an emotional speech that Bergman had “committed an assault on the institution of marriage.” He added that Bergman – once his favorite actor – was a “vile advocate of free love” and a “strong influence against evil”. Bergman remained in Europe for most of the next decade, giving birth to Isabella and her twin sister Isotta in 1952, while she was prevented from seeing her first child, Pia, after an unpleasant custody battle with her ex-husband Peter Lindström.

The film picks up the story around this time. We see home movie footage of the young girls playing at home, while their father struggles with his legacy and career in the wake of the scandal.

“I want to leave and never come back,” he said at the time. “Cinema as it is now no longer interests me.” Critics, once so enthusiastic, soured on his work. Many of the films he and Bergman made together were panned or ignored.

In 1956, he went on a solo trip to India, where he wrote colorful letters to his daughters. “I met a man known as the Dalai Lama,” he wrote in one of them. “I also became friends with another man. His name is Nehru. He is in charge here. We flew in his plane and passed over forests where wild elephants and tigers live.”

He and Bergman separated in 1957, after Roberto, then 51, had an affair with 27-year-old screenwriter Sonali Dasgupta, with whom he had a daughter. He also adopted her young son. Roberto was asked to leave India by Nehru – who had initially invited him.

Isabella dismisses any notion of her father’s absence or neglect during her childhood. In the summer holidays, he would rent a house on the Amalfi Coast, where everyone would meet, and despite constant hostility from the fans and the press, the different kids would get along together. “I never felt the difference between a full brother and a half brother. When we had to resume school, we would all go back to the houses where the mothers were, but on holidays, we were all together.”

However, the domestic arrangements seemed complicated, with Bergman and Roberto’s three children – then ages eight and six – living in their own apartment with a babysitter and housekeeper, and being taken in by each parent. “Mama would come and sleep with us, but she would also go back to Paris where she got married again,” says Isabella. “And daddy lived nearby with his new wife.”

However, Isabella emphasizes the “constant presence” of her father, whose fame was a surprise to his daughter. “At first, when I was young, I thought everyone was famous just by virtue of being parents. Then I realized that my parents were known by people who didn’t know them, while my friends’ parents were not recognized. It was a gradual understanding,” she says.

As well as her appreciation for their work in cinema. Disillusioned with his disillusionment with filmmaking, and her struggles to obtain copies, she did not see any of her father’s films until she was sixteen, when she sneaked into a Roberto retrospective in Rome. “I used to go every afternoon to see my father’s films, but I didn’t tell him. My father was always complaining about the festivals, the interviews, the film promotions, the red carpets – that kind of circus. He would get annoyed by the fans and all that. So when I went to see his films, I would do it secretly.”

When she finally told him, “I remember his face breaking down with tears in his eyes. He was actually very touched.” Since then, she has immersed herself in his work, and is particularly fond of Journey to Italy, with Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders as a bickering English couple on holiday.

“It was a modern, more sophisticated way of showing the couple with this unobtrusive cruelty,” she says. “One of the most touching scenes for me is when my mother goes to Pompeii as a tourist, but then, when she sees the old couple buried in the ash of the volcano, she bursts into tears because she sees love and sees death.”

Isabella recalls how the film was rejected upon its release in 1955 (the New York Times never bothered to review it). During their short marriage, Roberto was suspicious when Bergman received overtures to work from other directors, and largely discouraged her from working with anyone but him. She later wrote that she never forgave him for it, but Isabella defended her father, saying that his advice was motivated by a desire for protection. “He didn’t want to deal with America again,” she says. He added: “They were afraid, too. There was McCarthyism, and they had death threats.” Plus, “they had three kids and five movies. So they were very busy.”

When Roberto left for India, Bergman took the lead role in Anastasia (1957), which was filmed in London and served as a gateway film for her return to the United States – especially when she won an Oscar. “I think to some extent my father was hurt,” Isabella says. “Of course, he recognized his mother’s talent, but to some extent, her coming back to Hollywood was like, ‘I made a mistake, I don’t want to deal with Roberto.’

The new documentary has been meticulously researched, revealing reams of unpublished letters written by Bergman and Roberto. We learn how late in life Roberto embraced the student rebellions of the late 1960s, as well as his friendship with François Truffaut and David Lynch’s mentorship at the film school in Rome where he taught.

Isabella’s career is experiencing a renaissance, too: with an Oscar nomination for her role in Edward Berger’s Conclave earlier this year, and a breakout role opposite Joan Collins in the upcoming Wallis Simpson biopic. She has also directed short films, including Green Porno, about the sex lives of insects, and is currently planning “a new series of films about pets. But, like any director, I am always looking for money, begging for money.”

Meanwhile, she’s happy on her farm, surrounded by various rescue animals and trained guide dogs — enlightened by a graduate degree in ethics. This interest in itself was inspired by Konrad Lorenz’s 1949 book, “The Seal of King Solomon,” which talks about human communication with animals.

Her father gave her this book. “I remember saying, ‘This is what I’m going to do when I grow up,'” she says. “He knew this was my passion.” Instead, her joining the family business was a result of the lack of behavioral science courses in Italy when she left school.

She did not return to ethics until her late fifties, when her screen career seemed to falter. “I felt very marginalized,” she says. “Then my father’s advice came to mind: ‘If you follow your curiosity, you will always find happiness.’” She smiles and says it is the best advice she has ever received.