In December 2022, the British Film Institute’s Sight and Sound magazine released its decennial poll of the greatest films ever made. For seventy years, only three films had ever claimed the top spot: Bicycle Thieves, Citizen Kane, and Vertigo. When the 2022 list appeared, the number one position belonged to a three-hour-and-twenty-minute Belgian art film from 1975 called Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. The announcement stunned much of the film world, not least because the film’s star was a French actress who had spent most of her career overlooked by awards committees and who had died more than three decades earlier.
That actress was Delphine Seyrig, and the film that finally crowned her legacy as one of cinema’s most important performers was one she had made with director Chantal Akerman, a portrait of a widow’s rigid domestic routine slowly collapsing into violence. Seyrig was born in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1932, into a cultured Protestant family. Her father, Henri Seyrig, directed the Beirut Archaeological Institute and later served as France’s cultural attaché in New York during World War II. Her mother, Hermine de Saussure, was Swiss, the niece of the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure.
Her younger brother, Francis Seyrig, would become a successful composer. After the war the family settled in Paris, but Seyrig’s teenage years were split between France, Greece, and New York. She was never a committed student and left school at seventeen to pursue acting, a decision her father accepted on the condition that she take her training seriously. She studied under legendary instructors and in 1950 married the American artist Jack Youngerman in Paris.
Their son Duncan, born in 1956, would follow his uncle into composition. Seyrig made her stage debut in 1952 and quickly gained attention in the Parisian theater world. The respected actor and director Jean Dasté gave her major roles in productions of Shakespeare and Beaumarchais, and her performance in a Giraudoux play impressed demanding Parisian audiences. She seemed headed for conventional stardom, but the path was not smooth.
The Théâtre National Populaire, founded by Firmin Gémier to bring quality theater to a broad public and widely regarded as a gateway to fame, rejected her. The reason given was her voice: distinctive, deep, and melodious, it was apparently considered too unusual. In 1956, Seyrig moved to the United States with her husband and son. She hoped to join the Actors Studio, the legendary school associated with method acting, but like many accomplished actors before and after her, she failed the entrance test.
She was allowed to attend Lee Strasberg’s classes as an observer for three years, an experience that would shape her approach to performance. She found work in Connecticut theater and in an Off-Broadway production of Pirandello’s Henry IV that failed so disastrously that the producer allegedly burned the set designs in a rage. Yet the Actors Studio years were not wasted. In 1959, while starring in Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, she was approached after a performance by an enthusiastic audience member: the French director Alain Resnais, fresh from the success of Hiroshima mon amour.
He was planning a film based on the pulp character Harry Dickson and thought Seyrig would be perfect as the detective’s nemesis. That project never materialized, but the meeting launched one of the most important director-actress partnerships in European cinema. Her first feature film appearance came that same year in Pull My Daisy, a thirty-minute work associated with the Beat Generation. Written and narrated by Jack Kerouac, featuring Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Peter Orlovsky, and painter Larry Rivers, the film was largely improvised and embodied the Beat ideal of spontaneity.
Seyrig played Rivers’s wife. From there her career took unusual turns. In 1960 she appeared in three episodes of the CBS sitcom Pete and Gladys, a spin-off of the hit series December Bride, playing a French neighbor. It was an incongruous role, but it marked the end of her American period.
She cherished her time in the United States and later said she felt as American as she did French. In 1961 she returned to France, where her career would soon change dramatically. Resnais offered her the lead in Last Year at Marienbad, a film he created with writer and filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet. The movie, with its surreal atmosphere, ambiguous plot, and dreamlike dissolves of time and space, set a high bar for sixties art-house cinema.
Seyrig played a woman referred to only as A, whom a stranger, X, tries to convince they met and had an affair the year before. Whether the affair ever happened is never resolved. Resnais demanded extraordinary stillness from Seyrig, yet within that stillness she managed to convey innocence and growing desire simultaneously. Her deep, raspy voice added an eerie quality that made her presence in the film’s maze of mirrors and shadows unforgettable.
The film became a landmark, and Seyrig became its enigmatic center. Despite the film’s success, she returned to the theater, wary of the pitfalls of fame. She developed a tense relationship with the press, feeling that journalists twisted her words or fabricated quotes. She once said there was nothing to say about an actor; audiences should simply go and see them.
In her next film with Resnais, Muriel, she underwent a dramatic transformation. A dedicated method actress, she built extensive backstories for her characters and used makeup to appear middle-aged and less attractive. Her portrayal of Hélène, a seemingly scatterbrained but deeply troubled antique shop owner, was one of her finest. The performance earned her the Volpi Cup at the Venice Film Festival.
Seyrig remained cautious about stardom, once remarking that a star was like a racehorse on which a producer could bet money. Instead of chasing film roles, she devoted herself to demanding stage work. In 1964 she worked with Samuel Beckett for the first time, rehearsing the role of the woman in his play Play at her home. Beckett, long a resident of France, was impressed and cast her.
They performed the play on stage and later made a film version. She also appeared in films by other major directors. She was in Luis Buñuel’s The Milky Way in 1969 and played a brief love interest in François Truffaut’s Stolen Kisses in 1968. In 1969 she turned down the leading female role in The Swimming Pool, finding the part uninteresting despite encouragement from her friend Jean Sorel.
The role went to Romy Schneider, and the film became a classic of mid-century French cinema. Seyrig valued the ability to refuse work that did not speak to her. She accepted more unconventional projects. In 1968 she appeared in William Klein’s Mr.
Freedom, a satirical take on American imperialism, in which she played an expatriate American named Mary Meline. In 1967 she worked with the director Marguerite Duras, who was so taken with Seyrig that she called her the greatest actress in France and possibly the entire world, comparing her screen presence to Garbo and Clara Bow. The film was not among Seyrig’s most remembered, but it began a long collaboration between the two women. Seyrig’s distinctive voice was partly the result of chain-smoking, a habit that would eventually cost her life.
The early 1970s showcased her range. In Jacques Demy’s lavish fairy tale Peau d’âne, she played the Fairy Godmother, styled like a 1930s movie star with a purple satin dress and bleach-blonde finger waves. In 1971 she starred as a seductive vampire, the reincarnation of Elizabeth Báthory, in Harry Kümel’s Daughters of Darkness. The film blended erotic, campy, and political elements, and Seyrig’s performance, dressed in the Nazi colors of black, white, and red, gave the movie a genuinely unsettling edge.
Time Out later ranked it among the greatest horror films of all time. Her next major work was Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie in 1972, in which she played a calm, smiling, enigmatic blonde as a group of upper-class friends repeatedly fail to sit down to dinner. The film won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Buñuel, famously indifferent to awards, joked that he had bribed the Academy with twenty-five thousand dollars.
Seyrig then took roles in two British films, The Day of the Jackal in 1973 and The Black Windmill the following year. Neither was an art film, and some of her French fans felt betrayed, with critics arguing that the roles reduced her to a sex object. The Day of the Jackal was praised, but the choices puzzled those who knew her as a committed feminist and art-house icon. She also appeared in Joseph Losey’s adaptation of A Doll’s House, which she found a struggle; she and Jane Fonda clashed with the director over what they saw as a misogynistic reading of the play.
Despite the tension, the two actresses became close through their shared political radicalism. Her next major collaboration with Duras, India Song, required her to play the unstable wife of the French Ambassador in India, conveying languid sensuality through a loose-armed walk in the tropical heat. The film was shot in Paris. American critics dismissed it for lacking story, but even negative reviews spared Seyrig.
Vincent Canby of the New York Times wrote that she was marvelous to contemplate. In later years the film was reconsidered as a kind of dream poem. Her defining role came with Chantal Akerman. Akerman, a radical artist whose life was troubled by mental illness, cast Seyrig as Jeanne Dielman, a meticulous widow in Brussels who spends her days cooking, cleaning, and caring for her son, and who turns one trick each afternoon to support them.
The film observes her routines in near real time. Seyrig initially resisted Akerman’s direction; when Akerman instructed her to move slower without explanation, Seyrig demanded to know why. Eventually she embraced the vision, setting aside her Actors Studio training to embody the woman’s stillness. The performance transcends conventional acting.
On the first day, Jeanne’s routines seem controlled. On the second, small disruptions begin: a dropped spoon, burnt potatoes, a client who overstays. On the third day, everything unravels. She is laughed at in the post office.
Her coffee tastes so bad she throws it out. When her final client arrives, she keeps her clothes on during the sex. Afterward, as she ties herself in front of the mirror, she seems composed, but buried rage surfaces, and she kills him with scissors. She then sits calmly at the dining table with blood on her hands.
Whether or not one agreed with Sight and Sound’s choice, the film permanently established Seyrig’s place in cinema history. Seyrig had always been political, and working with Akerman intensified her activism. She signed the Manifesto of the 343, a petition in which French women declared they had undergone illegal abortions. In 1975 she founded a feminist video collective called Les Insoumuses, which produced works addressing women’s issues.
She directed three films with strong feminist themes, including Sois belle et tais-toi, which interviewed women in the film industry. She had long felt trapped by the feminine image she was expected to project, once saying she played femininity because it was the only way to get by in society. She regarded acting as a survival method and rebelled against it whenever she could. Her outspokenness, particularly her criticism of the French film industry and her feminist views, made her enemies, and many believed this was why she never won a César Award despite being regarded as one of France’s finest actresses.
Her final film was Joanna d’Arc of Mongolia in 1989, directed by Ulrike Ottinger. By then, decades of heavy smoking had caught up with her. She was diagnosed with lung cancer in the late 1980s and died in 1990 at the age of fifty-eight, the same year Greta Garbo also died. In 2002, the Museum of Modern Art held a retrospective of her work.
The actress Tilda Swinton, who met Seyrig at a women’s studies conference, recalled that Seyrig’s beauty was not the most important thing about her; she had a way of looking at you that invited you to see beyond her appearance. Seyrig never won the awards her peers did, but the films she made with Resnais, Buñuel, and Akerman ensured that her name remains inseparable from the most fertile era of European art-house cinema.
