Tomorrow November 13th would have been the 69th birthday of actress Jean Seberg, the delicate blonde beauty whose auspicious film debut in 1957 as Saint Joan–after being hand-picked for the role by director Otto Preminger–seemed to have set impossibly high expectations for her life and subsequent career.  While her most lasting fame came from her roles in European movies during the glory days of French New Wave cinema, this Iowa-born, uncommonly intelligent woman was treated poorly in her own country on many fronts.

How indeed, could an American teenager hope to fully inhabit the character of Shaw’s Joan of Arc?  Much of the criticism thrown at her and the film came from critics who thought her shallow and unconvincing, but some of that carping came from sources who were no doubt more perturbed at Preminger for fingering religion as a force for brutality.  Receiving universal raves for at least her perky pixie-length hair cut, Seberg had only slightly better notices for her Preminger-directed second film Bonjour Tristesse, where she continued her French phase as a sophisticated teenage girl with a playboy for a father.

In 1960 Jean Seberg starred opposite Jean-Paul Belmondo for writer Francois Truffaut and writer/director Jean-Luc Godard in the classic groundbreaking masterpiece Breathless, the film that helped usher in a breezy new style, completely contemporary in both characterization and technique.  Playing a young American girl marking time in Paris, Jean is adorable, naïve, shocking and irresistible.  Her success in France kept her busy for the next several years, during which time she was wed and divorced, then married novelist Romain Gary in 1962.  In 1964 she returned to the U.S. to star in director Robert Rossen’s (All the King’s Men, The Hustler) last movie Lilith, co-starring Warren Beatty and Peter Fonda.  As the titular Lilith, a disturbed and ethereal young woman who enchants Beatty’s young psychoanalyst, Seberg gave an unforgettable performance in a movie which unfortunately failed to ignite the box office yet continues to gain in critical stature. 

More European movies followed, along with several American titles, including Moment to Moment, A Fine Madness, and Pendulum, and finally she ended up in the big 1969 flop musical Paint Your Wagon.  While the movie was mocked and reviled for the singing of its non-musical stars Clint Eastwood and Lee Marvin, you can’t fault Jean Seberg for looking luscious as the runaway Mormon wife who takes the lusty pair of gold miners as her lawfully wedded husbands.  Seberg’s biggest box office success was the bloated crowd-pleaser Airport, where she runs around as an airport middle manager, all efficiency and with every bit of her unique talent and intelligence kept completely under wraps. 

It was to be her intelligence and feisty personality that would get Jean Seberg into trouble–big trouble–when she became an outspoken advocate for a variety of liberal and even radical political movements.  She supported Native American rights and the NAACP, but the cause that would eventually take the cruelest toll on Seberg was her support of the controversial revolutionary group the Black Panthers. In 1970 Jean Seberg was targeted by FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover.  He started a rumor, spread with the help of then-powerful Hollywood gossip columnist Joyce Haber, that the pregnant Seberg was carrying a baby fathered by one of the Black Panthers.  This shocking attack caused the seven-month along Seberg to go into early labor and deliver a stillborn child (though some sources say the child lived a couple of days).  In order to quell the rumors and clear her name, Seberg held a press conference and showed a photo of her dead baby–a pale little girl–to prove that the FBI smears were untrue.  (She also procured a glass coffin for the funeral to offer further proof.)

From this point on life was hellish for the beleagured Seberg.  She divorced Romain Gary shortly after the FBI mess and did marry again in 1972, but happiness seemed to be far out of reach by this point.  Though she continued to make films, her private life was wracked with bouts of severe depression and several suicide attempts, all of which took place on the anniversary of her daughter’s death in 1970.  In 1978 she threw herself under a train on the Paris Metro but survived.  In 1978 she married again, evidently while still legally bound to her third husband, but that didn’t stop the fourth from engineering the sale of her Paris apartment and reportedly abusing Seberg, who fled from him.

In August of 1979 Jean Seberg had gone through enough.  She was reported missing, and after an extensive search of Paris, Seberg was found, eleven days later, in the back seat of an automobile parked on a side street.  She had been dead for nearly two weeks, dying alone after a huge overdose of alcohol and drugs.  There were intimations that her suicide had been engineered by the same forces who attempted the Black Panther smear years earlier, but these suspicions were denied by the FBI, who were nevertheless hardly blameless in the deterioration of Jean Seberg’s mental state.

The sad story of Jean Seberg and her death at age forty-one is especially shocking when you watch one of her films, even the lesser titles.  She is radiant, clearly intelligent, and she paid the price for her independent spirit.  Even her fresh-faced Midwestern good looks and all the benefits they brought her couldn’t pull her back from the brink.