About Me
e"Jean Seberg was born November 13, 1938, in Marshalltown, Iowa. Born, raised and ultimitely stuck in Iowa until one day when Otto Preminger brought his months long, and much-publicized contest (involving some 18,000 hopefuls) to an end -- when he spotted the 17 year old, corn-fed Jean.But the failure of that film (Saint Joan, 1957 -- interesting tangent: during the final scene, in which Joan is burned on a stake, Seberg actually took a fireball full in the face on camera, resulting in one of the most realistic and disturbing death scenes in cinema history), and the only moderate success of her next film, Bonjour Tristesse (1958), combined to stall Seberg's career, until her role in Jean-Luc Godard's landmark New Wave feature, Breathless (1959), brought her renewed international attention. She then made The Mouse That Roared with Peter Sellers, also in 1959.She married her first of four husbands, François Moreuil in 1958, they were divorced in 1960. But Moreuil did direct Jean in Playtime (1962).In 1962, she married writer Romain Gary. He directed her in Birds in Peru (1968) and Kill! (1972), costarring James Mason. After her divorce from Gary, and their apparently nightmarish marriage, she married and divorced Dennis Berry who directed her in Grobe Ekstase (1975). And then she married and was still married to at the time of her death, Ahmed Hasmi.Romain Gary committed suicide the year after Jean.Other films Jean made include: Let No Man Write My Epitaph (1960), Philippe de Broca's Five Day Lover (1961), Robert Parrish's In the French Style (1962) with Bond girl Claudine Auger and Stanley Baker, working with Chabrol, Godard, Polanski in The Beautiful Swindlers (1964), with Belmondo again and Gert Frobe in Backfire (1964), two great Jean performances in American films: with Warren Beatty, Peter Fonda and Gene Hackman in Robert Rossen's Lilith (1964), with Honor Blackman in Mervyn LeRoy's classic bad movie, Moment to Moment. With Sean Connery and Joanne Woodward in A Fine Madness (1966), for Chabrol again in Line of Demarcation (1966) with Stephane Audran, and Chabrol's The Road to Corinth (1968), Pendulum (1968) with George Peppard, Richard Kiley and Charles McGraw, in Josh Logan's Paint Your Wagon (1969) with Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood, Burt Lancaster's love interest in the blockbuster Airport (1970), Yves Boisset's L' Attentat (1972) with Jean-Louis Trintignant and Michel Piccoli. After her death came the documentary Jean Seberg: American Actress (1995), and the docudrama From the Journals of Jean Seberg (1995), with Mary Beth Hurt as Jean.In the late 1960s, actress Jean Seberg became increasing active in left wing political groups. Her support for the anti-racist movement the Black Panthers was well known. But such was Seberg's influence, esspecially in Europe, that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover considered her a genuine liability, and, in 1970 when she was seven months preganant, issued instructions that Seberg be "neutralised".Thus it was that a fake letter was "leaked" to the Hollywood gossip columns, suggesting that the father of the child was not Gary, but a member of the Black Panthers. The reaction so traumatised Seberg that she gave birth prematurely, and the child was stillborn. The next day Seberg called a press conference, where she presented shocked journalists with the body of her dead white child. The measure, though extreme, put an end to the rumours, but the FBI continued to hound Seberg until she eventually moved back to Paris.Jean Seberg succumbed to severe bouts of depression, and was hospitalised several times. On every subsequent anniversary of her child's death she attempted suicide. In 1978 she even survived an attempt during which she threw herself under a train on the Paris Metro. Following this attempt she seemed more at ease, and even planned a return to filmmaking in 1979. However, she was reported missing in Paris later that year, and despite public pleas for her to return home, her legions of fans feared the worst. She had been missing for two weeks when she was found dead in the back seat of her car in a Paris suburb on 7th September 1979. She had taken a massive overdose of barbiturates, and had been dead for eleven days.Or, she died on September 8, 1979, in Paris, of a barbiturate overdose. I'm a bit confused, either she was found on the 8th or 7th, and or she died eleven days before that?There is a contingent that claims that the FBI may have been involved in her death/murder, but given Jean's track record this seems doubtful.Buried in the exclusive "Montparnasse" cemetery Paris, France. Her funeral was attended by Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Bouvoire, who now share a grave just metres away. Romain Gary himself committed suicide in 1980. Seberg and Gary were survived by a son, Diego Gary."
