Jean Seberg

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Jean Dorothy Seberg (* 13. November 1938 in Marshalltown , Iowa ; † 30th August 1979 in Paris ) was an American actress who with her role in Breathless a cult figure of the New Wave was. Seberg commuted between Hollywood and Europe and played leading roles in films of various genres. Few of the productions achieved commercial success, but some became film classics.

Live and act

Jean Seberg, the daughter of a pharmacist and teacher, studied performing arts at the University of Iowa . There the Austrian director Otto Preminger selected her in 1957 because of her expressive face and her natural charisma from 18,000 applicants for the role of Joan of Arc in the film adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's Die heilige Johanna . The selection process was already accompanied by immense media hype, but the film received rather mediocre reviews. Yet they committed Preminger, who had finished with her a seven-year contract, one year later, this time for the role of Cecile in with Deborah Kerr and David Niven star-studded adaptation of Francoise Sagan's bestseller Bonjour Tristesse . Considered a scandal by the public and critics at the time, the film established Seberg's fame; today he is regarded as the forerunner of the French Nouvelle Vague .

Injured by Preminger's authoritarian directorial style and artistically severely restricted by commercial pressure in Hollywood, Seberg, who was meanwhile married to a Frenchman, turned away from the USA in disappointment. In 1959 she starred alongside Peter Sellers in the British comedy The Mouse That Roared . She then shot the Nouvelle Vague classic Breathless with Jean-Luc Godard . At the side of Jean-Paul Belmondo , she played an American student who was ultimately undoing for a petty criminal. As a boyish saleswoman for the New York Herald Tribune on the Parisian Champs-Élysées , she became a style icon, one of the faces of the new French film . The role also earned her a 1962 British Academy Film Award nomination for Best Foreign Actress (but the award went to Sophia Loren for And Yet They Live ) . In 1964, Seberg won the title role in Robert Rossen's film drama Lilith at the side of Warren Beatty , who, as a war veteran, succumbs to the magic of a mysterious young psychiatric patient. For her acting performance, Seberg was nominated for the Golden Globe for best leading actress in a drama in 1965.

In the following years she worked for The Line of Demarcation and The Road to Corinth with Claude Chabrol . Other, rather insignificant films in America and Europe followed. She has twice starred in a leading role, directed by her second husband, the French diplomat and writer Romain Gary ; together with her he wrote the scripts for Birds Die in Peru and Kill! cinematic around. In addition to engagements in the musical film Westwärts der Wind (1969) with Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood and in the blockbuster Airport (1970), whose star line-up also included Burt Lancaster , Dean Martin and Jacqueline Bisset , she was active as a writer and director . Her short film Ballad for Billy the Kid (1974), in which she directed, wrote the screenplay, acted as a producer and also as an actress, was not a success. In 1976 she played her last role at the side of Bruno Ganz and Anne Bennent in Hans W. Geissendörfer's film adaptation of the play Die Wildente by Henrik Ibsen . After Seberg's death, scenes that had already been shot for Raoul Coutard's Operation Leopard (1980) were not used in the film.

COINTELPRO instruction to "neutralize" Jean Seberg through defamation

Jean Seberg was married three times. In 1958 she married the French lawyer François Moreuil, who co-wrote the screenplay for the film Burning Skin (1961) and who also directed with Fabien Collin. They divorced in 1960 shortly after filming. In July 1962 she gave birth to a son, Diego; Father was Romain Gary, 24 years his senior . This left his wife Lesley Blanch and married Seberg. Her involvement with the Black Panther movement put her in the sights of FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover and led to FBI surveillance and a smear campaign that would damage her career. When she was expecting her second child in 1970, it was rumored that Seberg had a liaison with a Black Panther activist and that he was pregnant. The media campaign was not without consequences. In August 1970, the baby Nina was born after only seven months and died two days after the birth. The photos of the corpse, often photographed by the press, showed a white child, which invalidated the rumors about the alleged father. In fact, the child was born out of an extramarital affair, but had been recognized by Gary.

In the following years Seberg is said to have tried to take his own life on the day of this loss. In 1972 she married the filmmaker Dennis Berry, who made the film The Great Ecstasy with her in the lead role in 1975 . In the last years of her life, excessive drug and alcohol consumption alternated with numerous hospital stays. Due to its increasing instability, it seemed no longer up to the mechanisms of the film business and the sensational press. A fourth marriage, on May 31, 1979, to the Algerian Ahmed Hasni, who apparently wanted to make a profit from the relationship with her, remained legally ineffective, as Seberg had not yet divorced Dennis Berry.

Grave in the Montparnasse cemetery in Paris

Jean Seberg was last seen alive on August 29, 1979 in Paris. On that day she attended the premiere of the film The Love of a Woman by Costa-Gavras , based on a novel by Romain Gary. Seberg felt hurt because she believed that her husband at the time had processed their relationship without asking her and that she herself would be embodied by Romy Schneider . The police found her body ten days later. She lay bare, wrapped in a blanket, between the front and back seats of her car, next to her sleeping pills and a suicide note, so that suicide was assumed to be the most likely cause of death . August 30, 1979 is given as the date of death. The exact circumstances of her death, however, remained unclear. Romain Gary and others alleged that she was murdered by American intelligence.

Jean Seberg was buried on the Cimetière Montparnasse in Paris .

After Seberg's death

The 1995 documentary Jean Seberg: American Actress by the brothers Donatello and Fosco Dubini portrays the life and work of Seberg and critically examines the circumstances of her death. It says z. For example, the doctor Marion Bouilhet stated that Seberg sounded completely sober shortly before she disappeared, but was then found with an alcohol content of almost eight per mille. Because of the alcohol content, which was well above the limit at which a person could fall into a coma (plus a large number of sleeping pills), Bouilhet doubted that Seberg could have consumed the fatal dose himself. A friend said that Seberg, who was found in the car without a piece of clothing, even though she was almost never naked in her apartment, would certainly not have left the apartment without clothes. In addition, there is the statement that all the cars around were covered with things that had fallen from trees - only Seberg's car was free and could therefore only go to this place after her death (which was ten days ago when she was found) have been brought.

Also in 1995 was Mark Rappaport's film essay From the Journals of Jean Seberg . In this “fictional autobiography”, Rappaport lets an older Jean Seberg, played by Mary Beth Hurt , look back on her life and film career in an unsentimental way. He compares Seberg's career with that of two politically committed actresses of her generation, Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave . From the Journals of Jean Seberg was awarded the 1995 Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award in the category of Best Experimental / Independent Film Award.

The Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes reflected his short but lasting affair with her in his novel Diana o la cazadora solitaria (1996; Eng . "Diana" or "The lonely huntress", 1998). The actress was also mentioned as "Little Jean Seberg" in the title track of the 2004 album Absent Friends by the Northern Irish band The Divine Comedy .

On August 30, 2019, around 40 years after her death, the film Jean Seberg - Against all Enemies premiered at the Venice Film Festival . It is directed by Benedict Andrews , and American actress Kristen Stewart was hired for the title role .

Filmography (selection)

  • 1957: Saint Joan (Saint Joan)
  • 1958: Bonjour Tristesse (Bonjour tristesse)
  • 1959: The Mouse That Roared (The Mouse That Roared)
  • 1959: Out of breath (À bout de souffle)
  • 1960: The Seed Breaks (Let No Man Write My Epitaph)
  • 1961: The adults (Les grandes personnes)
  • 1961: Burning skin (La Récréation)
  • 1961: Lovers for five days (L'amant de cinq jours)
  • 1962: Congo vivo
  • 1963: Plaisirs d'amour (In the French Style)
  • 1964: The boss has come up with something (Échappement libre)
  • 1964: Lilith
  • 1964: Women are to blame for everything (Les plus belles escroqueries du monde)
  • 1965: Diamond billiards (Un milliard dans un billard)
  • 1965: The Shot (Moment to Moment)
  • 1966: Samson can't be beaten (A Fine Madness)
  • 1966: The line of demarcation (La ligne de demarcation)
  • 1967: Sharks invite you to table (Estouffade à la Caraïbe)
  • 1968: The Strait of Corinth (La route de Corinthe)
  • 1968: Birds die in Peru (Les oiseaux vont mourir au Pérou)
  • 1969: Night Without Witnesses (Pendulum)
  • 1969: The wind moves westward (Paint Your Wagon)
  • 1970: Airport
  • 1970: Macho Callahan
  • 1971: Kill!
  • 1972: A Strange Love (Questa specie d'amore)
  • 1972: Camorra
  • 1972: The assassination (L'attentat)
  • 1973: Mask of Horror (La corrupción de Chris Miller)
  • 1974: Ballad for Billy the Kid (short film)
  • 1974: Anderson's Revenge (Cat and Mouse)
  • 1975: The great ecstasy (Le grand délire)
  • 1976: The wild duck

Awards

literature

Movies

Documentaries:

  • Jean Seberg forever. Documentary, France 2013, 53 min., Script and director: Anne Andreu, production: Cinétévé, Arte France, first broadcast: January 15, 2014 on arte.
  • The last days of a legend. Jean Seberg (OT: Les derniers jours d'une icône. Jean Seberg). Documentary, France 2006, 50:10 min., Script and director: Michéle Dominici, production: Sunset Presse, series: The Last Days of a Legend, first broadcast: August 24, 2007 on Phoenix , synopsis from fernsehserien.de.

Feature films:

Web links

Commons : Jean Seberg  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Roger Willemsen : Gute Tage - Encounters with people and places. ISBN 3-596-16520-2 , p. 141.
  2. ↑ Jean Seberg. In: Internationales Biographisches Archiv 16/2009 from April 14, 2009, supplemented by news from MA-Journal up to week 31/2009.
  3. ^ Profile in the Internet Movie Database (accessed August 29, 2009).
  4. ^ Profile at Find A Grave (accessed August 29, 2009).
  5. ^ A b Description of the production company: Jean Seberg: American Actress. Tre Valli Filmproduktion GmbH, accessed on August 26, 2011 .
  6. ↑ cf. Film critic Roger Ebert on Jean Seberg and From The Journals Of Jean Seberg, January 12, 1996 (accessed April 12, 2010).
  7. ↑ lemonde.fr
  8. ^ A b Richards, David: Played Out: The Jean Seberg Story. Random House . 1981, ISBN 0-394-51132-8 .
  9. ↑ Peter Hossli: Thrown away like a used Kleenex . In: Facts . August 10, 1995 ( hossli.com ).
  10. ↑ Daniela Besser: Romain Gary - The love of a woman. Review from August 26th, 2009 on AVIVA-Berlin.de , accessed on May 1st, 2020 .
  11. ↑ In the documentary: The Last Days of a Legend. Jean Seberg. 2006.
  12. ↑ Jean Nathan: Seberg. Through a cracked lens. In: The New York Times . February 25, 1996 (accessed April 12, 2010).
  13. ↑ Seberg . In: labiennale.org (accessed August 30, 2019).
personal data
SURNAME Seberg, Jean
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Carlsen, Jean
BRIEF DESCRIPTION US-american actress
DATE OF BIRTH November 13, 1938
PLACE OF BIRTH Marshalltown , Iowa
DATE OF DEATH August 30, 1979
Place of death Paris