Why Bob Dylan Didn’t Want Girlfriend Suze Rotolo’s Real Name in ‘A Complete Unknown’
Early in Bob Dylan’s time in New York, he began dating Suze Rotolo. In the recent film A Complete Unknown, Elle Fanning plays a version of Rotolo called Sylvie Russo. Dylan and Russo’s relationship stays true to his real-life one with Rotolo, but he reportedly wanted to give her a different name. Fanning shared why Dylan made this request.
Elle Fanning said Bob Dylan requested to change Suze Rotolo’s name
When Dylan moved to New York, he met Rotolo, an artist and activist who went on to inspire many of his songs. According to Fanning, Dylan added lines of dialogue to an argument scene with Russo.
“It was something like, ‘Don’t even bother coming back,’” Fanning told Rolling Stone. “We know the arguments were real, so maybe he was remembering something — or regretting something that he said to her.”
Still, he wanted to shield Rotolo with some level of anonymity. Unlike Joan Baez, whose relationship with Dylan is also in the film, Rotolo was not a public figure. Fanning believed this was showed the level of care he still felt for his former girlfriend, who died in 2011.
“[Rotolo was] a very private person and didn’t ask for this life,” Fanning said. “She was obviously someone that was very special and sacred to Bob.”
Bob Dylan shared how he felt when he first saw Suze Rotolo
Dylan said he fell for Rotolo from the moment he saw her.
“Right from the start I couldn’t take my eyes off her,” he wrote in his book Chronicles, Volume One (per NPR). “She was the most erotic thing I’d ever seen. She was fair-skinned and golden haired, full-blood Italian. The air was suddenly filled with banana leaves.”
He said this was the first time he’d felt that way about anyone.
“We started talking and my head started to spin,” he wrote. “Cupid’s arrow had whistled by my ears before, but this time it hit me in the heart and the weight of it dragged me overboard.”
She said it was a challenge to be in a relationship with a famous person
While she was still with Dylan, Rotolo seized an opportunity to travel to Perugia. Dylan publicly mourned their relationship while she was in Italy. Rotolo said that when she returned to the Greenwich Village music scene, she faced a chilly reception.
“I’ve always been a shy person, so to have this relationship kind of thrown right out there in public was very horrible,” she said. “I thought it was terrible. I was very private. I didn’t go broadcasting things around, and yet people seemed to know how I had made him suffer. Publicly, he was letting that out.”
While she later said she understood why he sang about her, it was not easy at the time.
“But I see that that was just his way of working through it, making it part of his art. But at the time, I just felt so exposed,” she said. “It was awful.”
