Hollywood Myths by Joe Williams

Author:Joe Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MBI
Published: 2012-03-11T05:00:00+00:00

JEAN SEBERG

Did the FBI drive the politicized pixie to suicide?

Jean Seberg was never a big Hollywood star. Over a twenty-year career she made thirty-seven movies, many of them in Europe. In France she was a fashion icon of the 1960s. But in her home country, the government regarded the little-known actress as an enemy and plotted to destroy her.

Jean Seberg was born in Marshalltown, Iowa, in 1938. At age seventeen, the fresh-faced farm girl won a nationwide talent search to star in Otto Preminger’s religious epic Saint Joan (1957). Although Preminger’s retelling of the Joan of Arc legend was based on a play by George Bernard Shaw, was adapted by Graham Greene, and costarred legend John Gielgud, it was a huge flop. After the bad reviews, the defiant director cast Seberg as another French girl in his next movie, an adaptation of the bestselling coming-of-age memoir Bonjour Tristesse (1958). That movie, which co-starred David Niven and Deborah Kerr, was another box-office disappointment.

Nevertheless, the film got Seberg noticed in France, where avant-garde director Jean-Luc Godard cast her in his groundbreaking movie Breathless in 1960. In the signature film of the French New Wave, Seberg played the innocent American girlfriend of a thief played by Jean-Paul Belmondo. Belmondo was the quintessence of cool, yet it was Seberg who became a trendsetter. Beatnik chicks on both sides of the Atlantic emulated her on- and off-screen look: short pixie haircut, boat-neck T-shirt, tight black slacks, and flat-heeled slippers.

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