Yours very truly and devoted, R. Rossellini
October 31, 2005 10:08 AM   Subscribe

And Ingrid Bergman? At the height of her popularity in America, after having played Joan of Arc on stage and on screen, she had an affair with Roberto Rossellini and left her husband and infant daughter to live with him. Add to that that she became pregnant with Rossellini's child while he was still married to another woman and before he and Bergman were married. These transgressions ended her American career for almost a decade. She was vilified in the press and from the pulpit, and was virtually excommunicated from movie theaters in the U.S. Her second Joan was in Rossellini's Joan at the Stake, at the end of their relationship. It didn't do either of them any good. It was the last of the five-and-a-half films they did together, during which time she didn't do films with anyone else because he didn't want her to.

_____________


Hollywood, Rossellini et le syndrome de Griffith
(.pdf file)
posted by matteo at 10:15 AM on October 31, 2005

Few films have had a bigger rise in critical/cultural standing than "Stromboli." Once dismissed as a scandal-ridden bore, it's now generally hailed, in Europe, as the first chapter of one of the supreme film director-actress collaborations: Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman.
Bergman plays a Lithuanian refugee who tries to escape the chaos of post-war Europe by marrying an Italian fisherman (Mario Vitale) and moving with him to his volcanic island of Stromboli. A fish out of water, she is rejected by the villagers, her alienation heightened by the rocky, isolated, sea-lashed landscape. When the volcano finally erupts, it almost seems to reflect her anger.
But that volcano also mirrors the explosive denunciations of Bergman that erupted across America when she left Hollywood for neo-realist Italy. In that day, scandal overwhelmed art: Bergman's notorious extramarital affair with director Rossellini resulted in her pregnancy, banishment from Hollywood and denunciation on the floor of the U.S. Senate.

"Stromboli" quality survived scandal
posted by matteo at 10:22 AM on October 31, 2005

It really was some drama, and it's awful that she had to leave her kids. (Pia Lindstrom, daughter from the first marriage, was for many years the movie reviewer for WNBC.)

I've always seen Bergman's story as the arthouse version of the Liz Taylor/Eddie Fisher/Debbie Reynolds thing.
posted by amberglow at 10:22 AM on October 31, 2005

If Notorious served as a high point in her career, [Ingrid] Bergman's extramarital relationship with Italian director Roberto Rossellini in 1949 marked the low ebb. Bergman became persona non grata in Hollywood--in all of America--when she abandoned her husband since 1937, the dentist Dr. Peter Lindstrom, and their daughter, Pia, for Rossellini, whose child she was carrying. Bergman was labeled "a free-love cultist" on the floor of the United States Senate, and the equally hypocritical Hollywood power brokers refused her services until 1956, when she starred in and won a Best Actress Oscar for Anastasia, which had been filmed in England.

Stephen M. Silverman, Dancing on the Ceiling: Stanley Donen and His Movies, Alfred A. Knopf: New York (1996), page 268:
posted by matteo at 10:24 AM on October 31, 2005

When Swedish actress Ingrid Bergman left her husband for 12 years for Italian director Roberto Rossellini, America was shocked. Cries of outrage were heard from Hollywood to Washington, D.C., where Senator Edwin C. Johnson delivered an impassioned speech over an hour long from the Senate floor. He called the actress "a free-love cultist," "a powerful influence of evil," and "Hollywood's apostle of degradation." The birth of their son, Robertino, in February, 1950, brought new outcries of damnation.

posted by matteo at 10:26 AM on October 31, 2005

Ok, matteo, time to let the other children comment.

Oh, and one of their love-children was Isabella Rossellini, in case someone out there's been living locked in a basement for the past few decades.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 10:52 AM on October 31, 2005

As an uplifting footnote to this story -- anyone ever see Murder on the Orient Express? In the twilight of her career, she has what amounts to a bit part amidst a great and talented ensemble cast (Sean Connery, Albert Finney, Michael York, et. al.) and basically steals the entire movie with a one take scene that lasts only 5 minutes. She won the best supporting actress Oscar for it that year -- and deserved it.
posted by drinkcoffee at 10:54 AM on October 31, 2005

A second footnote: their romance inspired Woody Guthrie's "Ingrid Bergman" featured on the Wilco & Billy Bragg collaboration Mermaid Avenue.
posted by Verdant at 1:29 PM on October 31, 2005

Isabella's written a tribute to her father.

http://www.twitchfilm.net/archives/003383.html
posted by Paddle to Sea at 1:48 PM on October 31, 2005

Ingrid Bergman, by Woody Guthrie

Ingrid Bergman, Ingrid Bergman
Let's go make a picture
On the island of Stromboli
Ingrid Bergman

Ingrid Bergman, you're so perty
You'd make any mountain quiver
You'd make fire fly from the crater
Ingrid Bergman

This old mountain it's been waiting
All its life for you to work it
For your hand to touch its hard rock
Ingrid Bergman
Ingrid Bergman

If you'll walk across my camera,
I will flash the world your story,
I will pay you more than money
Ingrid Bergman

Not by pennies dimes nor quarters
But with happy sons and daughters
And they'll sing around Stromboli
Ingrid Bergman

This old mountain it's been waiting
All its life for you to work it
For your hand to touch its hard rock
Ingrid Bergman
Ingrid Bergman
posted by keswick at 2:15 PM on October 31, 2005

>>I describe it because it is part of the ambience, like the prickly pears, the pines and the goats. But I can’t deny in the deepness of my soul there us [sic] a secret envy for those that can love so passionately, so wildly, as to forget any tenderness, any pity for their beloved ones. They are guided only by a deep desire of possession of the body and sold [sic] of the woman they love.

well-played prescience; and his letter was so beautiful...it cataloged such a sensitive, humble, ingratiating pen from a man so infatuated with love that it transcended the written word. And with this letter as their initial correspondence, it is easy to recognize why they both were so taken with each other; the affinity is undeniable.

...and really, ti amo [tanto] is possibly one of the only phrases in italian that anyone would ever need...
posted by naxosaxur at 3:45 PM on October 31, 2005

As an uplifting footnote to this story -- anyone ever see Murder on the Orient Express? In the twilight of her career, she has what amounts to a bit part amidst a great and talented ensemble cast (Sean Connery, Albert Finney, Michael York, et. al.) and basically steals the entire movie with a one take scene that lasts only 5 minutes. She won the best supporting actress Oscar for it that year -- and deserved it.

And four years later she gave the performance of her life in Ingmar Bergman's (no relation) fantastic Höstsonaten.

Great post, matteo. Thank you.
posted by mr.marx at 6:38 PM on October 31, 2005

Yes, and what a dirty song.
posted by dhartung at 9:50 PM on October 31, 2005

This is fun stuff.
posted by dejah420 at 12:57 PM on November 1, 2005