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In the summer of 1977, Roberto Rossellini died suddenly to a heart attack at his home in Rome, less than a week after presiding over the Cannes Film Festival. His child Isabella, then in her twenties, remembers her mother, Ingrid Bergman, remarking: “Father departed swiftly, just as fast as he handled his Ferrari.”

The Recent Film Sheds Light On Roberto’s Final Decades

The story of Rossellini’s final twenty years is presented in Living Without a Script, a recently released archive-based documentary that premieres this weekend in the Eternal City. While the movie acts as a testament to its subject’s status as one of the masters of world cinema—the central force in postwar Italian neorealism—it also shows his life beyond movies.

In the documentary, the filmmaker appears always busy: competing in auto races, studying biology and physics, and experimenting with TV—a medium that he embraced (unlike the majority of his contemporaries).

Personal Reflections from Isabella

Rossellini speaks from her property in New York, with her dog, Rosie, making occasional cameos on screen. Face to face—as in the press, on the stage, or on social media—Isabella is warm, candid, and unreserved. Such candour feels especially striking given the harrowing intrusions into their private affairs that her family have faced—and the new film emphasizes.

“As my mother and father began their relationship, they were married to different partners and so that created a very big scandal,” notes Isabella. “My mother was a film icon but not an US national, and she was not allowed to return to America.” This statement is straightforward, as if her mother’s terrible shaming and banishment were merely a immigration issue. In reality, her parents’ romance was a significant media sensation of the 1950s.

They initially connected after she sent a letter to him in the late 1940s, praising his movie Open City and inquiring if he might consider collaborating with her, citing her language abilities in an effort to convince him. “If you need a Swedish actress who knows English fluently,” she penned, “who has not forgotten her German, who is not very understandable in the French language, and who in the Italian tongue can only say ti amo, I’m prepared to arrive and shoot a film with you.”

A Forbidden Romance and Its Aftermath

Each wed (with kids) at the period, he to a costume designer and she to a neurosurgeon, they started an affair on the set of Stromboli (1950) and she fell pregnant with their eldest, their son.

While affairs were perceived as relatively common for male European directors approaching 50, they were considered beyond the pale for a actress whose impeccable reputation was cast in the classic film in the war years, and the historical drama (1948). “I’m just a woman,” said she of the outcry, which saw her shunned by production companies and even criticized in the US senate, when the Colorado senator Edwin C Johnson took to the floor and suggested a bill where movies would be approved based on the perceived morality of their actors.

She “committed an assault upon the sanctity of marriage,” stated Johnson in an passionate speech. He continued that the actress—who had formerly been his favourite performer—was a “vile advocate of free love” and “a powerful influence for wrongdoing.” She stayed in the continent for much of the following ten years, delivering to Isabella and her sibling, Isotta, in the early fifties, while being barred from visiting her eldest, Pia, after an unpleasant custody battle with her former husband, Petter Lindström.

Domestic Arrangements and Fatherly Presence

Isabella dismisses any notion that her dad was absent or inattentive during her youth. In the vacations, he would rent a house on the Italian coastline, where all the family would converge, and despite continuing hostility from audiences and the press, the different kids all were friendly. “I didn’t perceive the distinction between a biological sibling and a step-sibling. When we had to resume classes, we would all head to the houses where the mothers were but, in the holidays, we were all united.”

Domestic arrangements, however, seemed complex, with Bergman and Roberto’s three children—then aged eight and six—residing in their own flat with a babysitter and a maid, and stopovers from each parent. “Mother would come and sleep with us,” says Isabella, “but would also return to the French capital where she was wed again. Dad resided nearby with his second spouse.”

Nonetheless, Rossellini stresses the “constant presence” of her father, whose celebrity was a surprise to his daughter. “At the beginning, when I was little,” she explains, “I believed all parents was famous just by merit of being a parent. Then I realised that my parents were identified by strangers they didn’t know, while my friends’ parents were not recognised. It was a gradual understanding.”

Exploring Her Dad’s Films

Similarly her appreciation of their work in cinema. Affected by his disappointment 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 went secretly to a Rossellini film series in the city. “I attended every afternoon to see my dad’s movies but I kept it from him. Father was always grumbling about festivals, interviews, publicizing work and premieres—that sort of spectacle. He felt irritated with fans and all that. So when I went to see his work, I did it in private.”

When she finally confessed to him, “I remember his face crumbling and the water in his gaze. He was actually very touched.” Since then, she’s steeped herself in his work, and is particularly fond of Viaggio in Italia, with her mother and the actor as a quarrelling British pair on vacation.

“This was a modern and complex way to show a husband and wife with this harshness that remains subtle,” she comments. “Among the most touching moments for me is when my mom goes to Pompeii like a tourist, but then, when she observes the historic pair buried in the volcano ashes she bursts into tears because she witnesses affection and she encounters death.”

Career Struggles and Later Years

Rossellini remembers how the movie was disapproved of on its release in 1955 (the New York Times failed to cover it.). Through their brief marriage, Rossellini was doubtful when Ingrid received offers of roles from other directors, and mostly dissuaded her from working with anyone but himself. She subsequently stated that she did not excuse him for this, but their daughter supports her father, saying his guidance was driven by a wish to protect. “He didn’t want to work again with the US,” she explains. “Also, they were afraid. There was political persecution; they had death threats. Moreover, “they had three kids and five films. So they were very occupied.”

When Rossellini departed for India, Ingrid accepted the leading role in Anastasia