Delphine Seyrig



Delphine Claire Beltiane Seyrig (10 April 1932 – 15 October 1990) was a Lebanese-born French stage and film actress, a film director and a feminist.

Early life
Seyrig was born into an intellectual Protestant family. Her Alsatian father, Henri, was the director of the Beirut Archaeological Institute and later France's cultural attaché in New York during World War II. Her mother, Hermine de Saussure, was Swiss, and the niece of linguist/semiologist Ferdinand de Saussure.

Delphine was the sister of composer Francis Seyrig. Her family moved from Lebanon to New York when she was ten. When the family returned to Lebanon in the late 1940s, she was sent to school at the Collège Protestant de Jeunes Filles, which had been founded by Protestant pacifists and social justice activists in 1938. She attended the school from 1947 to 1950.

Career
As a young woman, Seyrig studied acting at the Comédie de Saint-Étienne, training under Jean Dasté, and at Centre Dramatique de l'Est. She appeared briefly in small roles in the 1954 TV series Sherlock Holmes. In 1956, she returned to New York and studied at the Actors Studio. In 1958 she appeared in her first film, Pull My Daisy. In New York she met director Alain Resnais, who asked her to star in his film Last Year at Marienbad. Her performance brought her international recognition and she moved to Paris. Among her roles of this period is the older married woman in François Truffaut's Baisers volés (1968).

During the 1960s and 1970s, Seyrig worked with directors including Truffaut, Luis Buñuel, Marguerite Duras, and Fred Zinnemann, as well as Resnais. She achieved recognition for both her stage and film work, and was named best actress at the Venice Film Festival for her role in Resnais' Muriel ou Le temps d'un retour (1963). She played many diverse roles, and because she was fluent in French, English and German, she appeared in films in all three languages, including a number of Hollywood productions.

Seyrig may be most widely known for her role as Colette de Montpelier in Zinnemann's 1973 film The Day of the Jackal. In turn, perhaps her most demanding role was in Chantal Akerman's 1976 film Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, in which she was required to adopt a highly restrained, rigorously minimalistic mode of acting to convey the mindset of the title character.

Seyrig was a major feminist figure in France. Throughout her career, she used her celebrity status to promote women's rights. The most important of the three films she directed was the 1977 Sois belle et tais-toi (Be Pretty and Shut Up), which included actresses Shirley MacLaine, Maria Schneider, and Jane Fonda, speaking frankly about the level of sexism they had to deal with in film industry. She also directed with Carole Roussopoulos an adaptation of the SCUM Manifesto by Valerie Solanas. In 1982 Seyrig was the key member of the group that established the Paris-based "Centre Audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir", which maintains a large archive of women's filmed and recorded work and produces work by and about women. In 1989, Seyrig was given a festival tribute at Créteil International Women's Film Festival, France.

Private life
Seyrig married (and was later divorced from) American painter Jack Youngerman (b. 1926), who had studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Their son Duncan (b. 1956, Paris) is a musician and composer working in both France and the United States.

Death
Seyrig died in Paris in 1990, aged 58, from ovarian cancer (although some sources simply state "lung disease" or "following a long illness"). She was interred there in Cimetière du Montparnasse.

Filmography (actress)

 * Pull My Daisy (1959) as Milo' wife
 * Last Year at Marienbad (1961) as A - la femme brune
 * Muriel ou Le temps d'un retour (1963) as Hélène Aughain
 * Who Are You, Polly Magoo? (1966) as Une jornaliste
 * Comédie (1966) as La maîtresse
 * Accident (1967) as Francesca
 * La musica (1967) as Elle
 * L'écume des jours (1968) as Récitant / Narrator (voice)
 * Stolen Kisses (1968) as Fabienne Tabard
 * Mr. Freedom (1969) as Marie-Madeleine
 * La voie lactée (1969) as La prostituée / The Prostitute
 * El Vientre de la ballena (1969)
 * Le Lys dans la vallée (TV)  (1970) as Mme de Mortsauf
 * Peau d'Âne (1970) as La fée des Lilas
 * Daughters of Darkness (Le Rouge aux Lèvres) (1971) as Countess Bathory
 * Tartuffe (TV)  (1971) as Elmire
 * The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) as Simone Thévenot
 * Le Journal d'un suicidé (1973) as L'interprète
 * The Day of the Jackal (1973) as Collette de Montpellier
 * A Doll's House (1973) as Kristine Linde
 * The Black Windmill (1974) as Celi Burrows
 * Diselo con flores (Dites-le avec des fleurs)  (1974) as Françoise Berger, la mère
 * Le Cri du coeur (1974) as Mme Bunkermann
 * Le Boucher, la star et l'orpheline (1975) as La veuve
 * Aloïse (1975) as Aloïse adulte
 * Der Letzte Schrei (1975) as Simone
 * Le Jardin qui bascule (1975) as Kate
 * Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) as Jeanne Dielman
 * India Song (1975) as Anne-Marie Stretter
 * Scum Manifesto (1976)
 * Caro Michele (1976) as Adriana Vivanti
 * Son nom de Venise dans Calcutta désert (1976) as Anne-Marie Stretter
 * Baxter, Vera Baxter (1977) as L'inconnue
 * Je t'aime, tu danses (1977) as Actrees narrating The Three Little Pigs
 * Repérages (1977) as Julie
 * Utkozben (1979) as Barabara
 * Le Chemin perdu (1980) as Mathilde Schwarz
 *  (1980) as Yvette
 * Le Petit Pommier (TV) (1981) as La mère
 * The Man of Destiny (TV) (1981) as The Lady
 * Documenteur (1981) as Delphine (voice)
 * Freak Orlando (1981) as Helena Müller, als Lebensbaumgöttin, Kaufhausonsängerin, Mutter der Wundergerbut...
 * Le Grain de sable (1983) as Solange
 * Dorian Gray im Spiegel der Boulevardpresse (1984) as Dr. Mabuse
 * Grosse (1985)
 * Seven Women, Seven Sins (1986) (segment "Pride")
 * Golden Eighties (1986) as Jeanne Schwartz
 * Les Étonnements d'un couple moderne (TV)  (1986) as Marie-Claude Poitevin
 * Letters Home (1986) as Aurelia Plath
 * Johanna D'Arc of Mongolia (1989) as Lady Windermere
 * Une saison de feuilles (TV)  (1989) as Hedwina
 * La Pagaille (1990)

Filmography (director)

 * Sois belle et tais-toi (1981)
 * Scum Manifesto (1976)
 * Maso et Miso vont en bateau (1975)