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In the summer of 1977, Roberto Rossellini died suddenly to a cardiac arrest at his home in Rome, only days after presiding over the Cannes Film Festival. His child Isabella, then in her mid-20s, remembers her mom, the Hollywood star, noting: “Dad departed swiftly, just as fast as he handled his Ferrari.”

The Recent Film Sheds Light On Roberto’s Final Decades

The narrative of Rossellini’s last two decades is told in Living Without a Script, a recently released archive-based film that premieres this weekend in Rome. While the film acts as a testament to its focus’s status as one of the greats of international film—the key figure in Italian neorealism after the war—it also shows his life outside movies.

In the film, the director appears perpetually on the move: racing cars, studying biology and physics, and exploring television—a format that he embraced (unlike most of his contemporaries).

Personal Reflections from Isabella

Isabella speaks from her farm in New York, with her golden retriever, Rosie, making occasional appearances on camera. Face to face—as in the media, on the stage, or on social media—she is friendly, open, and unreserved. Such honesty feels all the more surprising given the painful intrusions into their personal lives that her relatives have faced—and the new film emphasizes.

“When my parents got together, they were married to different partners and so that created a massive controversy,” says Rossellini. “My mother was a Hollywood star but not an US national, and she was not allowed back to the United States.” This statement is matter-of-fact, as if Bergman’s horrendous public disgrace and exile were simply a visa hiccup. In fact, Isabella’s parents’ relationship was a major tabloid event of the 1950s.

They initially connected after she sent a letter to Roberto in the late 1940s, praising his movie Rome, Open City and inquiring if he might consider working with her, mentioning her language abilities in an attempt to convince him. “If you need a Swedish actress who knows the English language very well,” she wrote, “who has not forgotten her German, who is barely comprehensible in French, and who in the Italian tongue knows only ti amo, I’m prepared to come and make a film with you.”

A Secret Affair and Its Consequences

Both married (with children) at the time, Roberto to a fashion artist and she to a doctor, they started an relationship on the set of Stromboli (1950) and she became expecting with their eldest, Robin.

While affairs were perceived as fairly de rigueur for men in film nearing fifty, they were deemed unacceptable for a female star whose flawless public image was cast in the classic film in 1942, and Joan of Arc (1948). “I’m just a woman,” said Bergman of the outcry, which saw her shunned by production companies and even criticized in the American government, when the Colorado senator Senator Johnson took to the floor and suggested a law where movies would be licensed based on the assumed morality of their stars.

Bergman “committed an assault upon the sanctity of wedlock,” stated the senator in an emotional address. He continued that the actress—who had previously been his preferred performer—was a “disgusting advocate of free love” and “a powerful force for wrongdoing.” Bergman remained in Europe for most of the next decade, giving birth to Isabella and her twin sister, Isotta, in 1952, while being prevented from seeing her first child, Pia, after an acrimonious legal dispute with her former husband, Lindström.

Domestic Arrangements and Paternal Influence

Isabella dismisses any idea that her father was absent or inattentive during her childhood. In the vacations, he would lease a villa on the Italian coastline, where all the family would gather, and in spite of ongoing animus from the public and the press, the different kids all got along. “I didn’t perceive the difference between a biological sibling and a step-sibling. When we had to return to classes, we would all go back to the houses where the moms were but, in the holidays, we were all united.”

Domestic arrangements, however, sounded complex, with Ingrid and Roberto’s kids—then aged eight and six—living in their own flat with a nanny and a maid, and visits from each parent. “Mama would stay over with us,” says she, “but would also return to Paris where she was remarried. Father resided close by with his second spouse.”

Nonetheless, Isabella emphasizes the “constant presence” of her parent, whose celebrity was a revelation to his child. “At the beginning, when I was little,” she says, “I thought everybody was well-known just by virtue of being a parent. Then I understood that my mother and father were identified by people they didn’t know, while my friends’ parents were not recognised. It was a gradual realization.”

Exploring Her Dad’s Films

Likewise her appreciation of their contributions in cinema. Affected by his disappointment with the film business, and finding it hard to source copies, she had not watched any of her dad’s films until she was 16, when she snuck off to a Roberto retrospective in the city. “I went every afternoon to see my father’s films but I kept it from him. Dad was always complaining about events, interviews, publicizing work and red carpets—that sort of spectacle. He felt annoyed with fans and all that. So when I went to see his films, I did it in private.”

When she finally confessed to him, “I remember his expression breaking and the tears in his gaze. He was truly very moved.” Since then, she’s steeped herself in his work, and is especially admiring of Viaggio in Italia, with her mother and George Sanders as a quarrelling English couple on vacation.

“It was a contemporary and more complicated way to show a husband and wife with this cruelty that remains subtle,” she says. “One of the most moving moments for me is when my mother travels to Pompeii like a visitor, but then, when she observes the historic pair entombed in the eruption debris she bursts into tears because she sees love and she encounters death.”

Professional Challenges and Later Years

Rossellini recalls how the movie was criticized on its release in the mid-fifties (the New York Times failed to review it.). Through their brief marriage, Roberto was doubtful when Ingrid got overtures of work from other directors, and largely dissuaded her from collaborating with others but himself. She later stated that she never forgave him for this, but Isabella defends her dad, saying his advice was motivated by a desire to shield. “He refused to work again with America,” she explains. “Also, they were afraid. There was political persecution; they had death threats. Plus, “they had three kids and five movies. So they were very occupied.”

When Roberto departed for India, Bergman took the starring part in Anastasia