Saint Jean

JEAN SEBERG
November 13, 1938 - September 8, 1979

The capsule biography of beautiful, doomed Jean Seberg reads like an improbable potboiler: a stunningly beautiful unknown is plucked from obscurity by legendary director Otto Preminger to star in his production of Saint Joan (1957); the film and untrained star are pilloried by critics, but she gains cult status as the heroine of New Wave cinema in Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (1959).

Seberg spends the next decade wavering between edgy foreign films and Hollywood hokum like Airport (1970); all the while, she is dogged by controversy surrounding her outspoken liberal politics, and even tapped by the FBI. Her (not unjustified) paranoia reaches macabre heights when a story is planted that the father of her unborn child is not her second husband, but a member of the Black Panthers; the stress leads Seberg to go into labor prematurely, resulting in a stillborn birth. A bereaved Seberg presents photos of the fetus to the press, to prove that her child was not of mixed race.

Now suicidally depressed, Seberg lives out a walking death wish for most of the 1970's; she even hurls herself under a Paris Metro train in an unsuccessful attempt at suicide. Blackballed from Hollywood and dependent on pills and alcohol, Seberg's agonizingly protracted self-destruction finally ends in 1979, when she is discovered dead in her car from an overdose, a suicide note clutched in her hand. Adding to her already operatic tale, conspiracy theories abound, with whispers of foul play and a cover up.

In stills and film, however, Seberg's mesmerizing grace and beauty still shine through; at times, she's a more pixieish Catherine Deneuve, at others an elegant Joey Heatherton, but always, distinctively, Jean Seberg. We hope that she's found peace. Viva Saint Jean!