Actors - Jean Seberg

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	Actors - Jean Seberg

Jean Seberg (November 13, 1938 - September 8, 1979) was an American actress born in Marshalltown, Iowa, USA who spent an important part of her career in France.

She was discovered by Otto Preminger, who directed her in her first two motion pictures. She would go on to star in thirty-four films in Hollywood and in France where she lived in Paris with her first husband, attorney François Moreuil. She became even more of an icon from her roles in numerous French films and the tragedy of her turbulent life. 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).

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 supported the Black Panther Party. Then FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, considered her a threat and in 1970, when she was seven months pregnant, allegedly created a story 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. Before Hoover's plan to disgrace her could be implemented, the story was reported by Joyce Haber of the Los Angeles Times newspaper, and Newsweek magazine. In a press conference after the miscarriage she presented the press with a viewing of her foetus to demonstrate that the child did not have a father of African heritage and to expose the malevolent falsehood of the claim used by the FBI in its illegal COINTELPRO effort to discredit her and violate her exercise of her constitutionally protected rights. Seberg stated that the trauma of this event brought on premature labor and her child was stillborn. According to her husband, after the loss of their child she suffered from a deep depression and became suicidal. Certainly her dependence on alcohol and prescription drugs was obvious to her (increasingly offbeat) circle of friends. She made several attempts to take her own life, including throwing herself under a train on the Paris Métro. Miraculously, she survived that incident.

Jean's problems 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 Berry as her third husband in 1972 and the marriage was still valid. In July, Hasni persuaded her to sell her opulent apartment on the Rue du Bac, and he kept the proceeds (reportedly eleven million francs in cash), announcing that he would use the money to open a Barcelona restaurant. The couple departed for Spain but Jean was soon back in Paris alone, and went into hiding from Hasni who she said had grievously abused her.

In August 1979, she went missing and was found dead eleven 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 very plausible 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. There are, however, good reasons to wonder 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. So Jean was an enigma in death, as she had been in life.

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

Trivia

In 1995 a documentary of her life was made titled: Jean Seberg: American Actress.
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.
Her second husband, Romain Gary, with whom she had a son, Alexandre Diego Gary, also committed suicide a year after her death.

Partial filmography

Saint Joan - (1957)
Bonjour tristesse
- (1958)
The Mouse That Roared
- (1959)
Breathless
- (1959) - (A bout de souffle)
Five Day Lover - (1961)
In the French Style - (1962)
Lilith
- (1964)
The Beautiful Swindlers - (1964)
Backfire - (1964)
A Fine Madness
- (1966)
Line of Demarcation - (1966)
The Road to Corinth - (1968)
Birds in Peru - (1968)
Pendulum - (1968)
Paint Your Wagon
- (1969)
Airport - (1970)
L'attentat - (1972)
Kill!
- (1972)
Camorra - (1972)
The Corruption of Chris Miller - (1973)
Les Hautes solitudes - (1974)
Grobe Ekstase - (1975)
White Horses of Summer - (1975)
The Wild Duck - (1976)

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Jean Seberg ]

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Actors - Jean Seberg

Trivia

Partial filmography

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