Delphine Seyrig | |
---|---|
Born |
Delphine Claire Beltiane Seyrig 10 April 1932 Beirut, Lebanon |
Died | 15 October 1990 Paris, France |
(aged 58)
Occupation | Actress |
Delphine Claire Beltiane Seyrig (French: [sɛʁiɡ]; 10 April 1932 – 15 October 1990) was a Lebanese-born French stage and film actress, a film director and a feminist.
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.
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.