Jump to content

Jean Seberg

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Ddruker (talk | contribs) at 18:31, 14 March 2007 (noted that Mary Beth Hurt was also from Marshalltown and knew Seberg as a child.). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Jean Seberg
File:Jean Seberg 8212.jpg
Seberg as she appeared in Breathless
Spouse(s)François Moreuil
Romain Gary
Dennis Charles Berry
Ahmed Hasni

Jean Seberg (November 13, 1938 – September 8, 1979) was an American actress. She starred in 34 films in Hollywood and in France. Seberg became even more of an icon after her roles in numerous French films and the tragedy of her turbulent life.

Biography

Early life

Seberg was born in Marshalltown, Iowa. Her family background was Lutheran.[1]

Career

Seberg was discovered by Otto Preminger, who directed her in her first two films. She made her film debut in 1957 in the title role of George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan. She secured the role after being chosen from 18,000 hopeful actresses. The young Seberg was then thrust into the glaring spotlight and subject of countless Cinderella stories. Expectations were high. When the film was released, reviews were generally mediocre, praising Jean's fresh beauty, but finding her in over her head playing Joan. Preminger never came to her defense. Among her roles, she co-starred with Jean-Paul Belmondo in Jean-Luc Godard's classic work of New Wave cinema, Breathless (original French title: A bout de souffle). Seberg also appeared in the 1959 classic Peter Sellers comedy, The Mouse that Roared. In 1969, she appeared in her first and only musical film, Paint Your Wagon, based on Lerner and Loewe's stage musical, but her voice was dubbed. She was one of the many stars in the 1970 disaster film, Airport.

Personal life

During the latter part of the 1960s, Seberg used her high-profile image to voice support for the NAACP and supported Native American school groups such as the Mesquakie Bucks at the Tama settlement near her home town of Marshalltown, for whom she purchased $500 worth of basketball uniforms. She also supported the Black Panther Party[2]. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover considered her a threat and in 1970, when she was seven months pregnant, created a story[3] to leak to the media that the child she was carrying was not fathered by her second husband, Romain Gary, but by a black civil rights activist. The story was reported by Joyce Haber of the Los Angeles Times newspaper[4], and Newsweek magazine[5]. She gave birth to a girl on 23 August but the infant died two days later[6]. In a press conference she presented the press with a picture of her fetus to demonstrate that the child did not have a father of African heritage. Seberg stated that the trauma of this event brought on premature labor and her child was stillborn. The child was named Nina Gary; the baby was actually fathered by Carlos Navarra.[7] According to her husband, after the loss of their child she suffered from a deep depression and became suicidal. She also became dependent on alcohol and prescription drugs. She made several attempts to take her own life, including throwing herself under a train on the Paris Métro.

Seberg's problems were compounded when she went through a form of marriage to an Algerian playboy, Ahmed Hasni, on May 31, 1979. The brief ceremony had no legal force because she had taken film director Dennis Charles Berry as her third husband in 1972 and the marriage was still valid[8]. In July, Hasni persuaded her to sell her opulent apartment on the Rue du Bac, and he kept the proceeds (reportedly 11 million francs in cash), announcing that he would use the money to open a Barcelona restaurant[9]. The couple departed for Spain but she was soon back in Paris alone, and went into hiding from Hasni, who she said had grievously abused her[10].

In August 1979, she went missing, and was found dead 11 days later in the back seat of her car in a Paris suburb. The police report stated that she had taken a massive overdose of barbiturates and alcohol (8g per litre). A suicide note ("Forgive me. I can no longer live with my nerves") was found in her hand, and suicide was ultimately ruled the official cause of death. However, it is often questioned how she could have driven to the address in the 16th arrondissement with that amount of alcohol in her body, and without the distance glasses she always maintained she absolutely needed for driving.[11] She was not yet 41 years old when she died. Her second husband, Romain Gary, with whom she had a son, Alexandre Diego Gary, also committed suicide a year after her death.

Grave of Jean Seberg

Seberg was interred in the Cimetière du Montparnasse, Paris, France.

Legacy

Mexican author Carlos Fuentes' novel Diana, The Goddess Who Hunts Alone (1972) is a fictionalized account of his affair with Seberg. In 1995, a documentary of her life was made, titled Jean Seberg: American Actress. Mary Beth Hurt played Seberg in a voice-over. Ironically, Hurt was also born in Marshalltown, Iowa, in 1946, and attended the same high school as Seberg. Seberg was for a short time Hurt's babysitter. A musical, Jean Seberg, by librettist Julian Barry, composer Marvin Hamlisch, and lyricist Christopher Adler, based on Seberg's life, was presented in 1983 at the National Theatre in London.

The short 2000 film Je T'aime John Wayne is a tribute parody of Breathless, with Camilla Rutherford playing Seberg's role. Actress Kirsten Dunst has proposed making a film about Seberg's life. The Irish band, The Divine Comedy, make reference to 'Little Jean Seberg' in their song titled "Absent Friends".

In 2004, the French author Alain Absire published Jean S., a fictionalised biography. Seberg's son Diego Gary brought a lawsuit unsuccessfully attempting to stop publication.

Partial filmography

Footnotes

  1. ^ http://www.alice-miller.com/articles_en.php?lang=en&nid=55&grp=11
  2. ^ "Played Out" (Random House, 1981) David Richards, p.204
  3. ^ http://www.saintjean.co.uk/politics.htm
  4. ^ Richards, p.239
  5. ^ Richards, p.247
  6. ^ Richards, p.253
  7. ^ Richards, p.234
  8. ^ Richards, p.367
  9. ^ Richards, p.368
  10. ^ Richards, p.369
  11. ^ Richards, p.377
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/enwiki/w/index.php?title=Jean_Seberg&oldid=115117086"