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 Francois 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,
since proven to have illegally kept large files on
private citizens, considered her a threat and in 1970,
when she was seven months pregnant, 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 the Los Angeles Times newspaper and
Newsweek magazine. In a press conference after the
miscarriage she presented the press with a viewing
of her fetus 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 Seberg's husband, after the loss of their
child she suffered from a deep depression and became
suicidal.
She made several attempts to take
her own life, including throwing herself under a train
on the Paris Métro. Miraculously, she survived
the incident, but less than a year later, 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).
Jean Seberg was interred in the Cimetière
du Montparnasse, Paris, France.
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.
Some of Jean Seberg's films
were:
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)
Playtime - (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)
source from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki
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