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BORN..Nov 13, 1938 - Marshalltown, Iowa
DIED...Sep 8, 1979- Paris, France
The career of actress Jean Seberg began with seemingly unlimited promise: a small-town girl from the heartland of America, she
created an overnight sensation when she was selected from a pool of 18,000 candidates for what seemed a certain future of fame
and celebrity. The dream quickly became a nightmare, however, and both her career and her life spiralled out of control as she
became a victim of unrealized expectations, exploitative films and even her own ideals. Born November 13, 1938 in
Marshalltown, Iowa, Seberg harbored acting dreams throughout her childhood, appearing in local productions of dramas like
Our Town and Picnic. She was just 17 when director Otto Preminger selected her from a national talent search to star as Joan
of Arc in his 1957 production of Saint Joan, but when reviews of the film as well as her performance were uniformly negative it
appeared that her career was already over. In an act of defiance, Preminger then cast Seberg again -- as another French girl, no
less -- in his next project, Bonjour Tristesse. Again, however, her future looked grim, and this time even Preminger gave up on
her, passing her contract on to Columbia, where they cast her in 1959's The Mouse That Roared for lack of a better project.
Seberg was already written off by Hollywood when French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, previously known as a critic for the
influential journal Cahiers du Cinema, requested her to co-star with Jean-Paul Belmondo in his feature debut À Bout de
Souffle. By sheer coincidence, she was already in Paris at the time, having just married attorney Francois Moreuil, and Columbia
loaned her out for practically nothing. As a pixieish American romancing a French thug, Seberg delivered an impressive
performance in what was to quickly emerge as one of the seminal films of the postwar era. Suddenly she was a hot property, and
Columbia quickly ordered her to return to the U.S. to appear in the anti-drug drama Let No Man Write My Epitaph. Hollywood
simply had no idea how to use Seberg, but in Europe she was much sought-after. She next appeared in La Recreation, and in
1961 Philippe de Broca cast her in his L' Amant de Cinq Jours. She also appeared in another Godard project, but the mercurial
director lost interest and never even began editing the completed footage.
Upon returning to America, Seberg closed out her Columbia contract with Robert Rossen's underrated 1964 drama Lilith, then
reunited with Belmondo for Echappement Libre. She continued moving back and forth from American films to French
productions, starring in Mervyn LeRoy's 1966 drama Moment to Moment and Irvin Kershner's A Fine Madness before
crossing the Atlantic to appear in Claude Chabrol's La Ligne De Demarcation and Jacques Bernard's Estouffade a la Caraibe.
For her second husband, writer-director Romain Gary, Seberg also starred in 1968's Les Oiseaux Vont Mourir au Perou. She
remained a major star in Europe, but back home there was little interest in her work, despite a plum role in 1969's Paint Your
Wagon. In fact, she gained greater notoriety for her high-profile involvement in the civil rights movement, especially her
controversial support of the Black Panthers, which even aroused the ire of the FBI. Ultimately, J. Edgar Hoover planted a
fallacious story in Newsweek that the father of Seberg's unborn child was a member of the Black Panther Party; the pregnancy
resulted in a premature birth, and the baby girl lived for less than two days before dying on August 25, 1970.
Though plagued by personal problems, Seberg, who had most recently appeared in Airport, continued working, first in the 1971
Italian production Questa Specie d'Amore, then reuniting with Gary (whom she'd already divorced) in his 1972 thriller Kill. A
year later she appeared in L' Attentat, then married Dennis Berry, the son of the expatriate American filmmaker John Berry. On
May 1, 1973 tragedy struck again when Hakim Jamal, a black activist to whom Seberg had previously been linked, was brutally
murdered. As the decade progressed, she acted with greater infrequency, co-starring with Kirk Douglas in the 1974 television
movie Mousey before returning to Europe to appear in a few other pictures not released to the foreign market. Die Wildente,
from 1976, was her last picture. Seberg was scheduled to appear in La Legion Saute sur Kolnezzi, a project from Georges de
Beauregard -- the producer of À Bout de Souffle -- but before filming began, she was found dead on September 8, 1979.
Filmmaker Mark Rappaport's"fictional documentary" From the Journals of Jean Seberg premiered in 1995.
* * * * * * *
1957..........Bonjour Tristesse........AVAILBLE
1957..........Saint Joan........AVAILBLE
1959..........The Mouse That Roared
1960..........À Bout de Souffle.... aka Breathless........AVAILBLE
1960..........La Recreation.... aka Playtime
1960..........Let No Man Write My Epitaph
1961..........Congo Vivo
1961..........L'Amant de Cinq Jours.... aka Five Day Lover
1961..........Les Grandes Personnes.... aka Time out for Love........Request
1962..........Demarcation Line
1963..........In the French Style.... aka La Frangaise
1964..........Echappement Libre.... aka Backfire
1964..........Les Plus Belles Escroqueries Du Monde.... aka The Beautiful Swindlers
1964..........Lilith
1965..........Diamonds Are Brittle
1965..........Un Milliard Dans Un Billard
1966..........A Fine Madness
1966..........Estouffade a la Caraibe....aka Stew in the Caribbean
1966..........Ligne De Demarcation
1966..........Moment to Moment
1968..........La Route de Corinthe........AVAILBLE
1968..........Les Oiseaux Vont Mourir Au Peru.... aka Birds Come to Die in Peru
1969..........Paint Your Wagon
1969..........Pendulum
1970..........Airport
1970..........Macho Callahan
1970..........Ondata Di Calore.... aka Dead of Summer
1971..........Kill
1972..........Camorra.....Les Tueurs a Gages...Italy...Dir: Pasquale Squitieri........AVAILBLE
1972..........Kill! Kill! Kill!........AVAILBLE
1972..........L'Attentat.... aka The Assassination
1973..........La Corrupcion de Chris Miller.... aka Sisters of Corruption
1973..........Questa Specie D'Amore .... aka This Kind of Love
1973..........The White Horses of Summer
1974..........Les Hautes Solitudes
1974..........Mousey aka Cat and Mouse
1975..........Le Grand Delire.... aka The Big Delirium
1976..........Behind the Shutters
1976..........Die Wildente.... aka The Wild Duck