Roberto Rossellini (May 8 1906 – June 3 1977) was an Italian film director. Rossellini was one of the most important directors of Italian neorealist cinema, contributing films such as Roma città aperta to the movement.

Born into a bourgeois family living in Rome, Roberto Rossellini lived in via Ludovisi, where Benito Mussolini had his first Roman hotel in 1922 when Fascism obtained power in Italy. Young Rossellini's fascination for "black shirts" has been repeatedly denied, though never completely.

Rossellini's father built the first Roman "cinema" (a theatre in which films could be shown), granting Roberto an unlimited free pass; Roberto started frequenting the cinema at an early age. When his father died, he worked as a soundmaker for films, and for a certain time he experienced all the accessory jobs related to the creation of a film, gaining competence in each field. Rossellini had a brother, Renzo, who later scored many of his films.

On September 26, 1936, he married Marcella De Marchis, a costume designer. This was after a quickly annulled marriage to Assia Noris, a Russian actress who worked in Italian films. Marcella De Marchis and Roberto had two sons: Marco Romano (born July 3 1937 and died prematurely in 1946), and Renzo (born August 24 1941).

In 1937 he made his first documentary, Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune. After this essay, he was called to assist Goffredo Alessandrini in making Luciano Serra pilota, one of the most successful Italian films of the first half of the 20th century. Then in 1940 he was called to assist Francesco De Robertis on Uomini sul Fondo.

His close friendship with Vittorio Mussolini, son of Il Duce and responsible for cinema, has been interpreted as a possible reason for having been preferred to other apprentices.

Some authors describe the first part of his career as a sequence of trilogies.

His first feature film, La nave bianca (1942) was sponsored by the audiovisual propaganda centre of Navy Department and is the first work in Rossellini's so-called Fascist Trilogy, together with Un pilota ritorna (1942) and Uomo dalla Croce (1943). To this period belongs his friendship and cooperation with Federico Fellini and Aldo Fabrizi.

When the Fascist regime ended in 1943, just two months after the liberation of Rome, Rossellini was already preparing Roma città aperta (1945) (with Fellini assisting on the script and Fabrizi playing the role of the priest), which he self-produced (most of the money came from credits and loans). This dramatic film was an immediate success. Rossellini had started now his so-called Neorealistic Trilogy, the second title of which was Paisà (1946), produced with non-professional actors, and the third Germania anno zero (Germany Year Zero, 1948), sponsored by a French producer and filmed in Berlin's French sector. In Berlin too, Rossellini preferred non-actors, but he was unable to find a face he found "interesting"; he placed his camera in the center of a town square, as he did for Paisà, but was surprised when nobody came to watch.

As he declared in an interview, in order to really create the character that one has in mind, it is necessary for the director to engage in a battle with his actor which usually ends with submitting to the actor's wish. Since I do not have the desire to waste my energy in a battle like this, I only use professional actors occasionally. One of the reasons of success has been supposed to be the fact that Rossellini rewrote the scripts according to the non-professional actors' feelings and histories. Regional accent, dialect, and costumes were shown in the film how they were in real life.

After his Neorealist Trilogy, Rossellini produced two films now classified as the "Transitional films": L'Amore (1948) (with Anna Magnani) and La macchina ammazzacattivi (1952), on the capability of cinema to portray reality and truth (with recalls of Commedia del Arte).

1948 was the year of love: Rossellini received a letter from a famous foreign actress proposing a collaboration: ::Dear Mr. Rossellini, :I saw your films Open City and Paisan, and enjoyed them very much. If you need a Swedish actress who speaks English very well, who has not forgotten her German, who is not very understandable in French, and who in Italian knows only "ti amo", I am ready to come and make a film with you.
:::Ingrid Bergman

By this famous letter begins one of the most popular love stories in cinema lore, with Ingrid Bergman and Rossellini both at the peak of their popularity and influence. They started working together the following year in Stromboli terra di Dio (1950) (in the island of Stromboli, whose volcano quite conveniently erupted during filming), and, in 1952, Europa '51. In 1954 Viaggio in Italia completed the so-called "Ingrid's Trilogy".

This affair caused a great scandal in some countries (Bergman and Rossellini were both married to other people); the scandal intensified when the two started having children (one of whom was-to-be actress and model Isabella Rossellini). Isabella has a fraternal twin sister, Ingrid Isotta, and a brother, Roberto Ingmar.

In 1957 Jawaharlal Nehru, the Indian Prime Minister at the time, invited him to India to make the documentary "India" and put some life into the floundering Indian Films Division. Though married to Ingrid Bergman, he had a torrid affair with Sonali Das Gupta, a screenwriter, who was helping develop vignettes for the film.http://www.hoveyda.org/india.html

Given the climate of the 1950s this led to a huge scandal in both Hollywood and India. Nehru had to ask Rossellini to leave. He married Sonali in 1957 and adopted her young son, Gil Rossellini (born October 23 1956). Rossellini and Sonali had a daughter together - Raffaella Rossellini (born 1958).

In 1971, Rice University in Houston, Texas, invited Rossellini to help establish a Media Center.

In 1977, Roberto Rossellini died of a heart attack, aged 71.

*There have been several retrospectives setup to celebrate what would have been Rossellini's 100th birthday. These have been held in Paris, Toronto, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In addition, during February and March 2007, there will be a retrospective ran by the UCLA Film and Television Archive.

*Roberto Rossellini forbade the Rossellinis or any friends of the Rossellinis from flying TWA because of Rossellini's hatred for Howard Hughes. This boycott lasted until Howard Hughes sold the airline.

*Dafne (1936) *Prélude à l'aprés-midi d'un faune (1937) *La Fossa degli angeli *Luciano Serra pilota (1938) *La Vispa Teresa (1939) *Il Tacchino prepotente (1939) *Fantasia sottomarina (1940) *Il Ruscello di Ripasottile *Un Pilota ritorna (1942) *La nave bianca (1942) *L'Uomo dalla Croce (1943) *Roma città aperta (1945) *Desiderio (1946) *Paisà (1946) *L'Amore (segment: "Il Miracolo") (1948) *Germania anno zero (1948) *L'Invasore (1949) *Stromboli terra di Dio (1950) *Francesco, giullare di Dio (1950) *Medico condotto (1952) *Les Sept péchés capitaux (segment: "Envie, L'Envy") (1952) *La macchina ammazzacattivi (1952) *Europa '51 (1952) *Siamo donne (segment: "Ingrid Bergman") (1953) *Amori di mezzo secolo (segment: "Napoli 1943") (1954) *Dov'è la libertà...? (1954) *Viaggio in Italia (1954) *La Paura (1954) *Giovanna d'Arco al rogo (1954) *India: Matri Bhumi (1959) *Il generale Della Rovere (1959) *Era Notte a Roma (1960) *Viva l'Italia! (1961) *Vanina Vanini (1961) *Uno sguardo dal ponte (1961) *Anima nera (1962) *Benito Mussolini (1962) *Ro.Go.Pa.G. (segment: "Illibatezza") (1963) *Les Carabiniers (1963) *Da Gerusalemme a Damasco (1970) *Rice University (1971) *Intervista a Salvador Allende: La forza e la ragione (1971) *Agostino d'Ippona (1972) *Concerto per Michelangelo (1974) *The World Population (1974) *Anno uno (1974) *Il messia (1976) *Beaubourg, centre d'art et de culture Georges Pompidou (1977)

*L'India vista da Rossellini (miniseries) (1959) *Torino nei cent'anni (1961) *L'Età del ferro (1964) *La Prise de pouvoir par Louis XIV (1966) *Idea di un'isola (1967) *Atti degli apostoli (miniseries) (1969) *"La Lotta dell'uomo per la sua sopravvenza" (series) (1970) *Socrate (1971) *Blaise Pascal (1972) *L'Età di Cosimo de Medici (1973) *Cartesius (1974) *Concerto per Michelangelo (1977)

* * * * NY Times: The Elusive Realism of Rossellini * Roberto Rossellini Award