The candles on the cake, were they to be lit, would provide a warm blaze of light. Tomorrow marks the 100th birthday of the great Italian film director Roberto Rossellini. He died in 1977, but that is a mere detail when it comes to the jubilee his family is planning.

His daughter Isabella Rossellini, model, actress and professional beauty, has just written a book about him, In the Name of the Father, the Daughter and the Holy Spirits. She has also put the finishing touches to an accompanying film, My Dad Is 100 Years Old.

She is the result of his union with the screen legend Ingrid Bergman, one of the most glamorous couplings in cinematic history. It is an illustrious parentage that has made her life both absurdly easy and damnably difficult. Her parents were both real and “mythical” figures, she once said, who belonged not just to her and her siblings but to the whole world.

But don’t expect either book or film to be a trip down Hollywood’s memory lane. In this quirky film, just 17 minutes long, Rossellini portrays her father as a large pink stomach whose voice emerges via his navel. No mouth, no face, just a disembodied belly. All the other parts are played by Rossellini herself, donning a succession of disguises to portray Charlie Chaplin, Alfred Hitchcock, Federico Fellini and Bergman, among others. These are the “holy spirits” of the book title.

This week the movie, directed by the avant-garde film maker Guy Maddin, will be released as a DVD within her book. Call it quirky or plain batty, the book contains photographs, illustrations and letters that make for a singular filial reminiscence.

“When we were children (there were seven of us), one of our favourite games was throwing ourselves on to Daddy’s body,” she writes. “Lying on his side, he pretended to be the sow and we were the piglets. My daddy always regretted not being able to nurse (breast-feed) us in real life, though for a long time I believed he was pregnant . . . He was soft to embrace, and there was a lot of him. I wanted him a lot, and I wanted all of him.”

She admits to her “Electra complex”, an excessive love of her father. “I loved my dad exaggeratedly,” she adds. “I never wanted to kill my mother — I loved her — but as a child I was definitely my dad’s girl.” She calls her tribute a “little love letter”.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the tribute has caused some consternation within the family. Her twin sister Isotta, a professor of Italian literature at New York’s Columbia University, has dismissed it as “inappropriate and offensive”.

Offensive or not, the project has been a long time coming. Her looks kept getting in the way. “When I was hot as a model,” she has said, “I always knew my entire schedule for the next eight months in advance. Every moment was planned and filled.”

Her face, with its flawless skin and Bergman features, was photographed by everyone from Richard Avedon to Robert Mapplethorpe. If proof of her loveliness were needed, the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris devoted a photographic exhibition, Portrait of a Woman, to her in 1988. But in 1992, at the age of 40, she was famously dumped as the face of the cosmetic house Lancôme for committing the apparent crime of growing older. In the 14 years she graced its campaigns, she earned almost £30m.

When Lancôme ended the contract, it offered her the option of saying she had resigned. She declined, announcing it had sacked her because she was middle-aged. Big mistake by Lancôme. Rossellini remains preternaturally young and beautiful and seized the opportunity to launch her own cosmetics range, Manifesto, in 1999.

She has said she finds it unnerving to be compared to her mother. “For years I didn’t believe I looked much like her,” she once said. “Then one day I was in an antiques shop, browsing around, when I saw this other customer. She looked distinguished and reminded me of my mother. Then I looked up at her face — and the lady was me! I had seen my reflection in a mirror.”

Born in 1952, Rossellini suffered a scandalous entry into the world. Three years earlier her parents had been vilified when they began an affair on a film set. Bergman, the star of Casablanca and Notorious, was the screen goddess who abandoned her dentist husband and 10-year-old daughter Pia to be with Roberto. Congress denounced her as a “free-love cultist” and “Hollywood’s apostle of degradation”. The pair had married by the time Isabella and Isotta were born, but were divorced within six years.