Jean Seberg

Jean Dorothy Seberg (November 13, 1938 – August 30, 1979) was an American actress who lived half her life in France. Her performance in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 film Breathless immortalized her as an icon of French New Wave cinema. She appeared in 34 films in Hollywood and in Europe, including Saint Joan, Bonjour Tristesse, Lilith, The Mouse That Roared, Moment to Moment, Paint Your Wagon, Airport, Macho Callahan, and Gang War in Naples. She was also one of the best-known targets of the FBI COINTELPRO project. Her targeting was in retaliation for her support of the Black Panther Party and was a smear directly ordered by J. Edgar Hoover.

About Jean Seberg in brief

Summary Jean SebergJean Dorothy Seberg (November 13, 1938 – August 30, 1979) was an American actress who lived half her life in France. Her performance in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 film Breathless immortalized her as an icon of French New Wave cinema. She appeared in 34 films in Hollywood and in Europe, including Saint Joan, Bonjour Tristesse, Lilith, The Mouse That Roared, Moment to Moment, A Fine Madness, Paint Your Wagon, Airport, Macho Callahan, and Gang War in Naples. She was also one of the best-known targets of the FBI COINTELPRO project. Her targeting was in retaliation for her support of the Black Panther Party and was a smear directly ordered by J. Edgar Hoover. Seberg died at the age of 40 in Paris, with police ruling her death a probable suicide. Her husband Romain Gary, Seberg’s second husband, called a press conference shortly after her death where he publicly blamed the FBI’s campaign against Seberg for her death. Her paternal grandfather, Edward Carlson, arrived in the U.S. in 1882 and observed, \”there are too many Carlsons in the New World\”. He decided to change the family’s last name to Seberg in memory of the water and mountains of Sweden. Jean had a sister Mary-Ann, and two brothers: Kurt and David, who was killed in a car accident at the aged of eighteen. She also had a younger sister, Mary Supinger, some eight years her junior, who would later become the stage and film actress known as Mary Beth Hurt.

In Marshalltown, she babysat Marysupinger, whom she later married and had a son, David, who was also an actor. She had a daughter, Mary Ann, who later became the star of the TV series The Adventures of Mary Ann in which she starred alongside David Carradine. She died in Paris in 1979, aged 40, and was survived by her husband and two children, David and Mary Ann. She is buried in a suburb of Paris, near her sister Mary Ann and her son David, and her daughter Mary Ann’s husband, Paul Belmondo, who also died in an accident at age 18. She left behind a husband and three children, and a son and daughter-in-law, David Seberg, who went on to star in the hit TV series “The Voice” and “The Big Lebowski” Seberg was married to French film director François Truffaut until her death in 1979. She did not identify with her achievements, not with her characters, but did identify with the free-love heroine of French NEW Wave films. She made her film debut in the title role of Saint Joan, from the George Bernard Shaw play, after being chosen from 18,000 hopefuls by director Otto Preminger in a USD 150,000 talent search. Despite a big build-up, called in the press a \”Pygmalion experiment\”, both the film and Seberg received poor notices. The film was associated with a great deal of publicity about which Seberg commented that she was ’embarrassed by all the attention’