Jean Seberg

Jean Seberg was a gamine, blonde actress who landed the title role in Otto Preminger's "Saint Joan" (1957) after a much-publicized contest involving some 18,000 hopefuls. She was best-known, however, for her contribution to New Wave cinema. The fresh-faced Iowan started acting in high school, but was a completely unknown 17-year-old when Preminger whisked her off to England. "Saint Joan" and its star were critically slammed, but Preminger went on to star her again in the soap opera "Bonjour Tristesse" (1958), which was scandalous and "modern" enough to buoy Seberg's career. After the silly but popular British comedy "The Mouse That Roared" (1959), Seberg was cast in Jean-Luc Godard's landmark New Wave feature "A Bout de souffle/Breathless" (1959), which brought her renewed international attention. As an American in Paris, selling papers on the streets and romancing wanted criminal Jean-Paul Belmondo, she gave a careless, modern and very hip performance. Seberg hopped back and forth from America to Europe, making a total of 30 films. In Mervyn LeRoy's "Moment to Moment" (1966), she was a professor's bored wife who drifts into an affair with murderous results. Seberg was another cheating wife in Irvin Kershner's "A Fine Madness" (also 1966) and played a woman sold to a hard-drinking prospector (Lee Marvin) in Joshua Logan's musical "Paint Your Wagon" (1969). Seberg was the passenger relations expert in the all-star blockbuster "Airport" (1970) and a woman going mad in Northern Africa in "Ondata di Calore/Dead of Summer" (1970). Her last feature was "Die Wildente/The Wild Duck" (1976), a German-language version of the Henrik Ibsen play. Seberg made her only US TV appearance in the ABC movie "Mousey" (1974), which co-starred Kirk Douglas and silent film veteran Bessie Love.