Jean Seberg
Jean Dorothy Seberg was an American actress. She is considered an icon of the French New Wave as a result of her performance in Jean-Luc Godard's 1960 film Breathless.
Seberg appeared in 34 films in the United States and Europe, including Saint Joan, Bonjour Tristesse, Lilith, The Mouse That Roared, Breathless, Moment to Moment, A Fine Madness, Paint Your Wagon, Airport, Macho Callahan, and Gang War in Naples. Seberg was among the best-known targets of the FBI's COINTELPRO project. Her targeting was in retaliation for her support of the Black Panther Party, a smear directly ordered by J. Edgar Hoover.
Seberg died at the age of 40 in Paris, the French police ruling her death a probable suicide. Seberg's second ex-husband, Romain Gary, called a press conference shortly after her body was found, at which he blamed the FBI's campaign against Seberg for her mental demise. Gary mentioned how the FBI had planted false rumors in the media that Seberg's pregnancy by Carlos Navarra in 1970 was by a Black Panther, and how the trauma had resulted in her overdosing on sleeping pills while pregnant. Gary stated that Seberg had attempted suicide on numerous anniversaries of the infant's death, August 25. At the time of her death, Seberg was separatedthough not divorcedfrom third husband Dennis Berry.
Early life
Seberg was born in Marshalltown, Iowa, the daughter of Dorothy Arline, a substitute teacher, and Edward Waldemar Seberg, a pharmacist. Her family was Lutheran and of Swedish, English, and German ancestry. Seberg had a sister, Mary-Ann, and two brothers, Kurt and David, the younger of whom was killed in a car accident at the age of 18 in 1968.Her paternal grandfather, Edward Carlson, arrived in the U.S. in 1882 and observed, "There are too many Carlsons in the New World." He changed the family surname to Seberg in memory of the water and mountains of Sweden.
In Marshalltown, Seberg babysat Mary Supinger, some eight years her junior, who became the stage and film actress Mary Beth Hurt. After she graduated from Marshalltown High School, Seberg enrolled at the University of Iowa to study dramatic arts but took up filmmaking instead.
Film career
Seberg made her film debut in the title role of Joan of Arc in Saint Joan, based on the George Bernard Shaw play, having been chosen from among 18,000 hopefuls by director Otto Preminger in a $150,000 talent search. Her name was entered by a neighbor.When she was cast on October 21, 1956, Seberg's only acting experience had been a single season of summer stock performances. The film generated a great deal of publicity, but Seberg commented that she was "embarrassed by all the attention." Despite great hype, called in the press a "Pygmalion experiment", both the film and Seberg received poor reviews. On the failure, she later told the press:
I am the greatest example of a very real fact, that all the publicity in the world will not make you a movie star if you are not also an actress.She also recounted:
I have two memories of Saint Joan. The first was being burned at the stake in the picture. The second was being burned at the stake by the critics. The latter hurt more. I was scared like a rabbit and it showed on the screen. It was not a good experience at all. I started where most actresses end up.
Preminger promised her a second chance, and he cast Seberg in his next film, Bonjour Tristesse, which was filmed in France. Preminger told the press: "It's quite true that, if I had chosen Audrey Hepburn instead of Jean Seberg, it would have been less of a risk, but I prefer to take the risk.... I have faith in her. Sure, she still has things to learn about acting, but so did Kim Novak when she started." Seberg again received negative reviews and the film nearly ended her career.
Seberg renegotiated her contract with Preminger and signed a long-term contract with Columbia Pictures. Preminger had an option to use her on another film, but they never again worked together. Her first Columbia film was the successful comedy The Mouse That Roared, starring Peter Sellers.
Mylène Demongeot recalled in a 2015 filmed interview in Paris: "Otto had high hopes in Jean and Saint Joan
''Breathless'' and French career
During the filming of Bonjour Tristesse, Seberg met François Moreuil, the man who was to become her first husband, and she then based herself in France, finally achieving success as the free-love heroine of French New Wave films.She appeared as the female lead in Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless as Patricia, co-starring with Jean-Paul Belmondo. The film became an international success and critics praised Seberg's performance; film critic and director François Truffaut even hailed her as "the best actress in Europe." Despite her achievements, Seberg did not identify with her characters or the film plots, saying that she was "making films in France about people not really interested in." Back in the U.S., she made another film for Columbia, the crime drama Let No Man Write My Epitaph.
In France, after appearing in Time Out for Love, Seberg took the lead role in Moreuil's directorial debut, Love Play. By that time, Seberg had become estranged from Moreuil, and she recollected that production was "pure hell" and that he "would scream at ." She followed with Five Day Lover, Congo vivo and In the French Style, a French-American film featuring Stanley Baker released through Columbia. She also appeared in the anthology film The World's Most Beautiful Swindlers and Backfire, which reunited her with Jean-Paul Belmondo.
Seberg starred with Warren Beatty in the American film Lilith for Columbia, which prompted the critics to acknowledge Seberg as a serious actress. She returned to France to make romantic crime drama Diamonds Are Brittle.
Return to Hollywood
In the late 1960s, Seberg was increasingly based in Hollywood. Moment to Moment was mostly filmed in Los Angeles; only a small part of the film was shot on the French Cote d'Azur. In New York City, she acted in the comedy A Fine Madness with Sean Connery and under the direction of Irvin Kershner.file:Jean Seberg 1969.jpg|thumb|200px|Seberg in 1969
In 1966 and 1967, Seberg played the leading roles in two French films directed by Claude Chabrol and co-starring Maurice Ronet. In February and March 1966, she starred in Line of Demarcation, filmed around Dole, Jura, and in May and June 1967, she played the lead role in the French-Italian Eurospy film The Road to Corinth, shot in Greece.
After making the crime drama Pendulum with George Peppard, Seberg appeared in her only musical film, Paint Your Wagon, based on Lerner and Loewe's stage musical and co-starring Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood. Her singing voice was dubbed by Anita Gordon. Seberg also starred in the ensemble disaster film Airport, which drew mixed reviews but was a huge success at the box office.
Later career
Seberg acted in the western Macho Callahan and the violent crime drama Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill!, but both films were failures. In 1972, she appeared in Gang War in Naples, which was successful in Europe but not in the United States.Seberg was François Truffaut's first choice for the central role of Julie in Day for Night, but after several fruitless attempts to contact her, he gave up and cast British actress Jacqueline Bisset instead.
Seberg's last American film appearance was in the TV movie Mousey. She remained active during the 1970s in European films, appearing in White Horses of Summer , The Big Delirium and Die Wildente.
At the time of Seberg's death, she was working on the French film Operation Leopard, which was based upon the book by Pierre Sergent. She had filmed scenes in French Guiana and returned to Paris for additional work in September. After her death, the scenes were reshot with actress Mimsy Farmer.
FBI COINTELPRO operation
During the late 1960s, Seberg provided financial support to groups supporting civil rights, such as the NAACP as well as Native American school groups such as the Meskwaki Bucks at the Tama County settlement near her hometown of Marshalltown, for whom she purchased $500 worth of basketball uniforms.As part of its extended campaign to smear and discredit black liberation and anti-war groups, which began in 1968, the FBI became aware of several gifts Seberg had made to the Black Panther Party, totaling an estimated $10,500 in contributions; these were noted among a list of other celebrities in FBI internal documents later declassified and released to the public under FOIA requests.
The FBI operation against Seberg, directly overseen by J. Edgar Hoover, used COINTELPRO program techniques to harass, intimidate, defame, and discredit her. The FBI's stated goal was an unspecified "neutralization" of Seberg with a subsidiary objective to "cause her embarrassment and serve to cheapen her image with the public", while taking the "usual precautions to avoid identification of the Bureau." The FBI's strategy and modalities can be found in its interoffice memos.
In 1970, the FBI created a false story from a San Francisco-based informant that the child Seberg was carrying was not fathered by her ex-husband Romain Gary, as initially claimed, but by Raymond Hewitt, a member of the Black Panther Party. The story was reported by gossip columnist Joyce Haber of the Los Angeles Times as a blind item. It was also printed by Newsweek magazine, in which Seberg was directly named. Seberg went into premature labor and, on August 23, 1970, gave birth to a baby girl. The child died two days later. Seberg held a funeral in her hometown with an open casket that allowed reporters to see the infant's white skin to disprove the rumors, though she later acknowledged that a Mexican student revolutionary, Carlos Navarra, was the actual father.
Seberg and Gary later sued Newsweek for libel and defamation, asking for $200,000 in damages. She contended that she had become so upset after reading the story that she went into premature labor, which resulted in the death of her daughter. A Paris court ordered Newsweek to pay the couple $10,800 in damages, and it ordered Newsweek to print the judgment in its publication and eight other newspapers.
The Seberg investigation went far beyond the publication of defamatory articles. According to friends interviewed after her death, she experienced years of aggressive in-person surveillance, amounting to constant stalking, as well as burglaries and other means of intimidation. Newspaper reports say Seberg was well aware of the surveillance. FBI files show that she was wiretapped, and in 1980, the Los Angeles Times published logs of her Swiss wiretapped phone calls. U.S. surveillance was deployed while she was residing in France and while traveling in Switzerland and Italy. The FBI files reveal that the agency contacted the FBI legal attachés in the U.S. embassies in Paris and Rome and provided files on Seberg to the CIA, Secret Service and military intelligence to assist in monitoring Seberg while she was abroad.
Two weeks after Seberg's death in 1979, the FBI admitted what it had done nine years previously. FBI records show that Hoover kept President Richard Nixon informed of FBI activities related to the Seberg case through Nixon's domestic affairs chief John Ehrlichman. Attorney General John Mitchell and Deputy Attorney General Richard Kleindienst were also kept informed of FBI activities related to Seberg. At the time of the FBI's admission of its activities, Haber was no longer writing a column, having been fired in 1975 for often using unattributed information in her column. Following the FBI's admission, Haber said she could not disclose the source of the information from her column and said, "If I were used by the FBI, I didn't know it.... I am certainly shocked to learn that the FBI engaged in planting stories with news people." This point of view stands in stark contrast to historical analysts of FBI institutional behavior. Researchers Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall stated in their book, The Cointelpro Papers: Documents from the FBI's Secret Wars Against Domestic Dissent, that "There is no indication that Richard Wallace Held ever considered to be anything other than an extremely successful COINTELPRO operation."