Seyrig, Delphine

(1932-1990)

   Actress and director. Delphine Seyrig was born in Beirut, Lebanon. She acted on the stage in French theaters in the 1950s and in 1956 relocated to New York. In 1959, she appeared in Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie's Pull My Daisy, a short narrated by beat poet Jack Kerouac. Her career was launched with her starring role in Alain Resnais's 1961 film L'Année dernière à Marienbad. In 1963, she won the Volpi Cup for best actress in Resnais's Muriel at the Venice Film festival. Fluent in English and French, she played in French and British films in the 1960s, notably Joseph Losey's Accident (1967) and A Doll's House (1973), François Truffaut's Baisers volés (1968), and William Klein's Mister Freedom (1969). Her collaboration with Luis Bunuel was fruitful; after a small role in Bunuel's The Milky Way (1969), she landed a pivotal role in his classic Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie (1972).

   Seyrig worked for prominent women directors Marguerite Duras and Chantel Ackerman and starred in Duras's India Song (1975) and Ackerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai de commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), Golden Eighties (1986), and Letters Home (1986). Seyrig was active in the women's rights movement and helped to establish the Simone de Beauvoir Center, a resource for documentary filmmakers with feminist concerns. Seyrig directed her own documentary about the careers of actresses, Sois belle et tais-toi (1977). It featured Romy Schneider and Jane Fonda, among others.

   Seyrig was truly a pan-European actress, playing in French, British, German, Belgian, and Hungarian films. She acted in Belgian director Harry Kumel's Les Lèvres rouges (1971), British director Fred Zinneman's The Day of the Jackal (1973), British director Don Siegel's The Black Windmill (1974), French director Guy Gilles's Le jardin qui bascule (1975), French director Liliane de Kermadec's Aloïse (1975), Hungarian director Màrta Mészaros's Utkozben (1979), and German director Ulrike Ottinger's Dorian Gray im Spiegel der Boulevardpresse (1984) and Johanna d'Arc of Mongolia (1988).

   Historical Dictionary of French Cinema by Dayna Oscherwitz & Mary Ellen Higgins