Delphine Seyrig | |
|---|---|
 Seyrig in 1972 | |
| Born | Delphine Claire Beltiane Seyrig (1932-04-10)10 April 1932 Beirut, Lebanon |
| Died | 15 October 1990(1990-10-15) (aged 58) Paris, France |
| Occupation | Actress |
| Years active | 1952–1989 |
| Spouse | Jack Youngerman (divorced) |
| Children | 1 |
| Parent(s) | Henri Seyrig (father) Hermine de Saussure (mother) |
Delphine Claire Beltiane Seyrig (French:[sɛʁiɡ]; 10 April 1932 – 15 October 1990) was a Lebanese-born French actress and film director. She came to prominence inAlain Resnais's 1961 filmLast Year at Marienbad, and later acted in films byChantal Akerman,Luis Buñuel,Jacques Demy,Marguerite Duras,Ulrike Ottinger,François Truffaut, andFred Zinneman. She directed three films, including the documentarySois belle et tais-toi (1981).
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Seyrig was born into an intellectualProtestant family. HerAlsatian father,Henri Seyrig, was the director of the Beirut Archaeological Institute and later France's cultural attaché in New York during World War II.[1] Her mother,Hermine de Saussure [fr], wasSwiss, and the niece of linguist/semiologistFerdinand de Saussure.
Delphine was the sister of composerFrancis Seyrig [fr]. Her family moved fromLebanon toNew York City 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.[citation needed]
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As a young woman, Seyrig studied acting at the Comédie de Saint-Étienne, training underJean Dasté, and at Centre Dramatique de l'Est. She appeared briefly in small roles in the 1954 TV seriesSherlock Holmes. In 1956, she returned to New York and studied at theActors Studio. In 1959, she appeared in her first film,Pull My Daisy (short). In New York she met directorAlain Resnais, who asked her to star in his filmLast Year at Marienbad (1961). Her performance brought her international recognition and she moved to Paris. Among her roles of this period is the older married woman inFrançois Truffaut'sStolen Kisses (1968).
During the 1960s and 1970s, Seyrig worked with directors including Truffaut,Luis Buñuel,Marguerite Duras, andFred Zinnemann, as well as Resnais. She achieved recognition for both her stage and film work, and was named best actress at theVenice Film Festival for her role in Resnais'Muriel (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 ofHollywood productions.
Seyrig may be most widely known[according to whom?] for her role as Colette de Montpellier in Zinnemann's 1973 filmThe Day of the Jackal. In turn, perhaps her most demanding role[according to whom?] was inChantal Akerman's 1975 filmJeanne 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[according to whom?] of the three films she directed was the 1977Sois belle et tais-toi (Be Pretty and Shut Up), which included actressesShirley MacLaine,Maria Schneider, andJane Fonda, speaking frankly about the level of sexism they had to deal with in the film industry. She also directed withCarole Roussopoulos an adaptation of theSCUM Manifesto byValerie Solanas.[2]
Seyrig,Carole Roussopoulos, and translator Ioana Wieder, formed the feminist video collectiveLes Insoumuses [fr] in 1975, after meeting at a video-editing workshop that Roussopoulos organized in her apartment. The nameLes Insoumuses is a neologism combining "insoumise" (disobedient) and "muses". The collective produced several videos together, focusing on representations of women in the media, labour, and reproductive rights.[3]
In 1982, Seyrig was a key member of the group that established the Paris-basedCentre audiovisuel Simone-de-Beauvoir [fr], 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 tribute at theCréteil International Women's Film Festival.[citation needed]
Seyrig married (and was later divorced from) American painterJack Youngerman (1926–2020),[4] who had studied at theÉcole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Their son Duncan (b. 1956, Paris) is a musician and composer working in both France and the United States. Seyrig's granddaughter, Selina Youngerman, is a working actress based in London.
In 1971, Seyrig signed theManifesto of the 343, publicly declaring she had had an illegal abortion.[5] She was theunrequited love of Anglo-French actorMichael Lonsdale.[6]
Seyrig died in a Paris hospital on October 15, 1990, from lung cancer, aged 58.
