“Hollywood screen siren” would fall short in the description of Ingrid Bergman. The Nordic actress’s cinematic contributions spanned five languages, leaving far fewer audiences in need of subtitles than the average leading lady. Born a century ago this year, Bergman was the focus of Saturday evening’s tribute at BAM’s Beaux Arts opera house, where Isabella Rossellini and Jeremy Irons took to the stage to honor her indelible life and career. “I’m not doing it just to celebrate my mom,” says Rossellini, who championed the centennial. “If that was the intention, I would have just done a beautiful dinner party at home with my family!”
For Rossellini, the evening was as much a promotion of the preservation and study of film as it was a commemoration of her mother’s multilingual cinematic oeuvre. The theatrical tribute will travel to France and Italy, coming on the heels of the biopic Ingrid Bergman: In Her Own Words, out this November. Here, Rossellini spoke to Vogue.com to share more about the anniversary.
How did you conceive the idea of a 100th anniversary celebration?
My mom kept a vast archive. When she died in 1982, she told me that she knew that she had had an important career and she knew that she had worked with a lot of artists, but at the time there weren’t really film archives or museums for cinema. All her letters, scripts, footage, photos, and diaries she left to me, and I was married to Martin Scorsese at the time, who is a wonderful film historian. Marty was very helpful at guiding me and my family in locating an institution that could create an archive, and we found Wesleyan University. We gave everything to the archive in 1985, but I worked very closely with it, and it was my knowledge of all these archives that made me feel, Well, when the centennial comes, maybe this material should be put together somehow. It also helped the Swedish director Stig Björkman’s documentary, which will be coming out in November.
How did the centennial onstage tribute come to be?
The director of the show is Guido Torlonia, and I had been to a presentation of his in honor of Federico Fellini and Luchino Visconti. He had edited reviews and letters and illustrated everything with photos and newsreels. In an hour and 10 minutes he really gave you a sense of the time and the character of the directors and how their films were received. I was so impressed because it was very simple: there were two actors onstage reading with a screen in the back, and I thought we could do the same with my mom just using her autobiography. With Guido, we selected excerpts from my mother’s biography, and I had done the book Ingrid Bergman: A Life in Pictures, which is a big photographic book containing about 560 photos, so I had already done all the research and knew the archives. I also knew that my mom had done a lot of home movies, so we included those too, in addition to regular film clips that show my mom’s career. The original format was conceived by Guido, and there were always two actors onstage reading, so I reached out to Jeremy Irons. Whenever we ran into each other, we would say, “Oh, it would be great to work together,” and so I thought of him because he is known both here and in Europe, and my mom was very international. He accepted it right away very generously. I’ll do the show again in France with Gérard Depardieu, and then in Italy with Christian De Sica, because we have to adapt to the languages.
Did you come across anything surprising in your research?
I was surprised, when I looked at the photos and did the research, that Mother looks very contemporary though she died 30 years ago. For example, in some of the photos taken when we were born in the ’50s, she looks incredibly modern in the way she dressed. Sometimes she’s surrounded by people who looked as though they were in period costumes compared to her. She had a style of her own. Maybe the simplicity of being Swedish, a certain freedom. She would wear shorts when other people didn’t wear shorts and pants when women weren’t even allowed to enter restaurants in them. I guess she had a skirt to go to restaurants, but she had a very practical way of dressing and this practical, modern, comfortable way determined her style.
How important was fashion to your mother? Did she have a favorite designer?
I don’t remember having fashion magazines around and I don’t remember Mama talking about fashion. As every actress, she had social obligations, interviews, appearances, and award ceremonies, but she wasn’t faithful to one designer. She was very good friends with Umberto Tirelli—he did all the Visconti costumes. I remember Mama sometimes asking Umberto to help her with an evening dress. Sometimes it was clothing that he would put together, or sometimes he would go with her to look at dresses by another designer, but it was nothing like today. The red carpets and all that didn’t exist as they do today.
Your mother’s films required period costumes, wardrobes by legendary costume designers, and even a nun’s habit! Did she have a favorite film, costume-wise?
She was very amused to do a film called The Visit because she had to play a very rich lady, and Bulgari lent a lot of very important jewelry to her. I remember bodyguards following her around with all these cases of rubies and emeralds and diamonds, and everybody around was looking at the incredible jewelry she wore for this film, none of which we could afford.
In addition to commemoration of your mother, a beloved actress to many, what do you hope will come of this anniversary?
Because I was married to Martin Scorsese, I was indoctrinated into film preservation and looking at film as art. The centennial was the occasion for me to really look at all that we’ve done for her extraordinary archive since Mother died 33 years ago and gives an example of what the archive can really offer, not only in terms of new product and new films but culturally. I think cinema and rock ’n’ roll have been the two arts that have influenced us the most in the last century and neither are treated as sculptures, tapestries, or paintings in the sense that they already have an infrastructure of museums and archives. It’s starting to get better, but a lot of studios don’t have the budget to conserve their films and schools don’t teach films. They teach literature, which is important, but children have probably seen more films than they have read novels, and it would be great for them to learn. If you understand the framework, you can appreciate a film better and it becomes even more exciting to watch. It’s the bigger picture that I’m thinking about when celebrating my mother.
This interview has been edited and condensed.