Jean was born on November 13, 1938 in Marshalltown, Iowa, United States, the daughter of Ed Seberg, Jr. , a pharmacist, and Dorothy Arline Benson, a schoolteacher. (The family name became Seberg when her paternal grandfather changed his name from Carlson after emigrating from Sweden. ) Seberg grew up in an archetypal midwestern American setting.
Jean Dorothy attended public schools, played in the school band. In order to please her parents, Seberg enrolled at the University of Iowa.
Jean Dorothy taught Sunday School, worked at her father's drugstore, and was a bit of a tomboy. She won an American Legion oratory contest, was teen chairman of the Iowa March of Dimes, and was elected lieutenant governor of Iowa Girls State.
Prophetically, she appeared in a school film production of Sabrina Fair. While she was still a freshman, her high school drama coach entered her name in a worldwide competition that film director Otto Preminger was conducting to find a lead for a big-budget film production of George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan. The competition, which eighteen thousand girls had entered, climaxed in the fall of 1956 when Seberg was named the winner; she was instantly transformed into a national celebrity.
Seberg worked on Saint Joan in the glare of unprecedented publicity, only to see it open in 1957 to uniformly unfavorable reviews. Devastated by hostile reactions to the film, she went into seclusion in Nice, France, beginning an almost permanent exile from the United States.
Late in the summer of 1957 Seberg made a second film with Preminger: Bonjour Tristesse (1958), about a sophisticated adolescent obsessed with her father. Critical reaction was kinder, but Seberg's application to the Actors Studio in New York City was ignored, and Preminger turned her contract over to Columbia Pictures. She then had small supporting roles in The Mouse That Roared (1959) and Let No Man Write My Epitaph (1960).
Meanwhile, Jean-Luc Godard cast Seberg as the American mistress of a French criminal played by Jean-Paul Belmondo in A Bout de Souffle. The expressionless face and flat, hesitant voice that had been limitations in her first films became strengths in this film, helping her establish a new screen image ambiguously mixing wholesomeness and amorality. Godard's film was a success in France and played to good reviews as Breathless in the United States (1961). She now became a star of the French New Wave and later gained reacceptance in Hollywood as an international film personality.
Throughout the early 1960's, Seberg continued to work in France. Her fluency in French was improving rapidly, but she almost always played American characters.
In 1963, Seberg made In the French Style, her first purely English-language film since 1958; however, this film was essentially an adaptation of her New Wave work. Critical reaction to this film was so favorable that Columbia offered her a greatly improved contract.
Seberg's strongest performance in an American film was probably Lilith, a 1964 adaptation of a J. P. Salamanca novel directed by Robert Rossen. Seberg received good notices, but the film itself was panned. The next year Universal cast her in a big-budget production, Mervyn LeRoy's Moment to Moment (1966). Through the remainder of the decade she continued to work on both sides of the Atlantic.
Her best-known American films during this period were Paint Your Wagon in 1969 and the 1970 disaster film Airport. What was probably Seberg's last significant role came in Ondata di calore (The Dead of Summer) in 1970. She gave a powerful performance as a schizophrenic American stranded in Morocco. Just as she was maturing as an actress, however, she was approaching an emotional breakdown from which she would never recover.
Seberg's film career stalled in 1972. She had become too old to be an ingenue, but was still too young for interesting character roles. None of the eleven films that she made during her last decade is of outstanding interest.
On the night of August 30, 1979, she disappeared after leaving her Paris apartment. Nine days later she was found dead in a parked car; she had apparently used barbiturates to take her life the night she had disappeared.
Jean Dorothy Seberg appeared in 34 films in Hollywood and in Europe, including Saint Joan, Bonjour Tristesse, Breathless, 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 a well-documented retaliation for her support of the Black Panther Party in the 1960s.
Seberg was known as an active supporter of black nationalist causes in the United States throughout the 1960's.
On September 6, 1958, Seberg married François Moreuil, an American-educated French lawyer who helped her make contacts in the French film industry. The marriage lasted almost exactly two years.
Seberg married another Frenchman, author Romain Gary, who was twenty-five years her senior, on October 16, 1963. They had two children and divorced in 1970. In Geneva, on August 23, 1970, she delivered a daughter who survived just two days. Seberg never recovered emotionally. Gary later claimed that every year thereafter she attempted to kill herself on the anniversary of her daughter's death.
While searching for a new direction in her career, she met Dennis Berry, a young American actor and would-be filmmaker who had grown up in France. They capped a brief affair by flying to Las Vegas, Nevada, where they were married on March 12, 1972.
During her last year Seberg lived with a young Algerian actor, Ahmed Hasni, with whom she went through a wedding ceremony in May 1979, although she remained legally married to Dennis Berry.
