Isabella Rossellini is explaining the other side of being a nepo baby: Maintaining your parents’ legacy.
The actress told Variety that it “breaks my heart” Gen Z doesn’t know who her parents, iconic star Ingrid Bergman and director Roberto Rossellini, are. Bergman starred in classic films such as “Casablanca,” “Notorious,” “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” and “Gaslight.” Rossellini directed Bergman’s films “Stromboli” and “Fear,” among other features.
“I used to be introduced as ‘Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini’s daughter,’ and it bothered me, because I would think, ‘I am my own person,’” Rossellini said. “But now, the younger generation doesn’t know them, and it breaks my heart. Their reputations outlived them, but fame is very brief.”
Ingrid Bergman infamously had an affair with Rossellini on the set of “Stromboli” in 1950. Bergman was married at the time, and later denounced on the floor of the U.S. Senate for having Rossellini’s child out of wetlock.
“She followed her heart, but she also paid a terrible price for being so emancipated,” Rossellini said of her mother Bergman. “It’s complicated.”
Rossellini later facilitated 2015 documentary “Ingrid Bergman: In Her Own Words,” which was narrated by Alicia Vikander.
Rossellini told IndieWire that her famous upbringing was instrumental to inspiring her own film career. Not all kids grow up with Frederico Fellini as a family friend, for example…
“Fellini had a wonderful sense of humor. He said to me one day, ‘My mother wanted me to be a lawyer, wanted me to be a doctor. Why do you want to be a filmmaker? You’re going to always be so miserable, it’s going to be so hard.’ [He said], ‘Now, I’ve become an objective Felliniesque,’” Rossellini said. “When you look at the great maestros, like Fellini or my dad, now we talk, oh my god, they are gods of cinema. But they struggled as much as Alice [Rohrwacher], as much as Julio Torres [director of Rossellini’s film ‘Problemista’], and all the young filmmakers. I said that to Alice. It’s not going to get better, that’s the way it is.”
Rossellini added of emphasizing film history, “The other day, I live in the country [in Long Island, New York], and we have a little art movie theater, and I did a series of films about Chaplin, for the children. A lot of the parents had never seen silent films. I was very surprised. I came because, in the winter, there’s not much to do in the country, and they came, and he was a discovery. The children […] are getting used to watching black and white, and not to look at film as this spectacular thing, like an amusement park.”
