As a supermodel in the 1980s, Isabella Rossellini appeared on 28 covers of Vogue, nine of them photographed by Richard Avedon. Then, in 1986, she brilliantly subverted her chic image by playing the sadomasochistic lounge singer in Blue Velvet. The role launched an avant-garde screen career that proved there was more to Rossellini than a beautiful face — or her relationships with directors Martin Scorsese and David Lynch. But it is as the daughter of Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini that she is still, perhaps, most famous.
It's a fate she readily embraces. Now 54, Rossellini is the devoted gatekeeper of her parents' celluloid legacy. In the past year, she has lovingly promoted her father's centenary via a book about their relationship — In the Name of the Father, the Daughter and the Holy Spirits — and a short film, My Dad Is 100 Years Old. On Sunday she introduced a retrospective season of the great Italian neo-realist's work in London. The films included in the season — from Rome, Open City and Stromboli to Viaggio in Italia — formed the backdrop to her parents' scandalous romance and troubled marriage.
Sitting in her Manhattan apartment, Rossellini is quick to admit that she has never pursued film acting with the same tenacity as did her mother. "I don't have that body of work she had," she says, "my successful career was in modeling, not film. I don't know whether it was because I started late or because Hollywood was closed to foreign actors by then, but I have never been a bankable actress."
She has starred in landmark movies, notably David Lynch's Blue Velvet, but generally though she has sought out talented directors such as Vincente Minnelli, Peter Weir and John Schlesinger, she hasn't always appeared in their best films, or biggest roles. Her career has been patchy. "Mom's bankability meant she could command more of what she wanted to do," she says, "I think it's much clearer where she was going."
Where Ingrid Bergman was going in 1949 had momentous consequences for her career and her life. The previous spring she and her husband, Petter Lindstrom, had attended a Hollywood screening of Rossellini's Rome, Open City. Filmed in Roman locations and casting ordinary people alongside its stars, his stark, docudrama style was revelatory. In her 1972 autobiography, Bergman described the film as "heart-shocking. No one looked like an actor and no one talked like an actor. There was darkness and shadows, and sometimes you couldn't hear, and sometimes you couldn't even see it. But that's the way it is in life."
During the 1940s, Bergman had starred in Casablanca, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Joan of Arc, three Hitchcock thrillers — Spellbound, Notorious, and Under Capricorn — and seven other Hollywood features. She won an Oscar for her portrayal of the psychologically tortured niece in George Cukor's Gaslight. But it wasn't enough. After her Open City epiphany, she sent Rossellini a letter that has become part of movie lore: "If you need a Swedish actress who speaks English very well ... and who, in Italian knows only ti amo I am ready to come and make a film with you." The note was as calculatedly ambitious as Rossellini's avid reply, which offered Bergman the lead in Stromboli, the story of a war refugee who marries a Sicilian fisherman and finds herself trapped on the volcanic island where he lives. Bergman, whose affairs had been tolerated by Lindstrom, wanted to escape her marriage and Hollywood career. Rossellini wanted a star.
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