Martin Scorsese helped Isabella Rossellini memorialise mum Ingrid Bergman

Martin Scorsese helped his then-wife Isabella Rossellini conserve artifacts documenting her mother Ingrid Bergman’s stellar film career.

The 64-year-old Blue Velvet star has helped Swedish director Stig Bjorkman make a documentary about her mother’s life, during which she won three Academy Awards and starred alongside Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, the 1942 film often rated as one of the greatest movies of all time.

And Martin, who was married to Isabella for three years from 1979, used restoration skills he honed from preserving old films to help her conserve her mother’s legacy after her death aged 67 in 1982.

“After she died we were so lucky - I was married to Martin Scorsese, and he is the biggest promoter of film restoration and looking at films as culture, so all old films can be seen,” Isabella told Total Film magazine.

“Marty helped us to conserve all these papers and we finally gave it to (Connecticut’s) the Wesleyan University, which started an archive. Marty’s papers are in the same archive.”

Despite her interest in remembering her Swedish film star mother, Isabella says she hasn’t built up a trove of mementoes from her own career, just like her father, the Italian director Roberto Rossellini, who was married to Ingrid from 1950 to 1957.

“I haven’t conserved my things; I’m busy conserving mama’s things!” she explained. “Father was more difficult; he was completely disorderly. It was an example of Italian and Scandinavian culture. Mother was totally organised.”

Ingrid Bergman in Her Own Words opened in the U.K. on 12 August (16), after gaining a limited release in the U.S. last year (15).