Jean Seberg

The Martyrdom of the Girl from Iowa

Otto Preminger was searching for a fresh face among eighteen thousand hopefuls to play Joan of Arc. He chose a seventeen-year-old girl from Iowa who knew nothing about the industry or public humiliation. That decision in 1957 marked the start of a televised personal demolition.

During the filming of Saint Joan, she suffered real burns when the bonfire fire got out of control. But the physical pain was nothing compared to the merciless contempt of New York critics, who tore her apart. Preminger made her shoot Bonjour Tristesse a year later on the French Riviera, and that was where her luck changed.

Nobody protected her.

France saw something in her that Hollywood completely ignored. Jean Seberg had a gaze that blended the innocence of the Midwest with a European melancholy that was very hard to fake. And that vulnerability is what attracted the directors who were about to break every rule in cinema.

A Haircut That Invented the Future

In 1960, Jean Seberg strolled down the Champs-Élysées selling the New York Herald Tribune in Breathless. She wore her hair short and a T-shirt with the newspaper's logo, a look that redefined female style for an entire decade. Jean-Luc Godard filmed her with complete freedom while she improvised dialogue and looked straight into the camera.

But she never felt part of that world of intellectuals and cigarette smoke. She felt like an outsider in Paris and a traitor in the United States. So she began searching for a purpose that went beyond the mediocre scripts offered to her in her home country.

And the gamble paid off.

In 1964, she starred in Lilith alongside Warren Beatty. It was her best performance, because in the role of a psychiatric patient she poured out all the instability she was already beginning to feel in her own life. The major studios called her back for big-budget productions such as Paint Your Wagon in 1969, but her mind was already somewhere else.

The Harassment by the Men in Black

Jean Seberg decided to use her money and fame to support causes the U.S. government considered dangerous. She financed the Black Panther Party and got involved in the fight for civil rights for Native Americans. That put her in the crosshairs of J. Edgar Hoover.

The FBI launched a systematic smear campaign to destroy her career and her mental health. In 1970, they leaked to the press that the child she was expecting was not her husband's but that of a Black activist. The stress caused by the harassment brought on a premature birth, and the baby girl died two days after she was born.

Jean Seberg buried her daughter in a glass coffin so that everyone could see she was white.

From that trauma on, she was in and out of psychiatric clinics constantly. She attempted suicide every year on the anniversary of her daughter's death while still making minor films in Europe. In 1974 she appeared in Les Hautes Solitudes, Philippe Garrel's film with almost no dialogue, where only her devastated face is seen.

Her body was found in the back seat of her white Renault on a Paris street in September 1979. She had been missing for ten days, and beside her were a suicide note and a bottle of barbiturates. French police determined that her blood alcohol level was eight grams per liter at the time of her death.