Biography from Leonard Maltin's Movie Encyclopedia:

It should have been a great American success story: Small-town girl wins the leading role in a major motion picture and rockets to overnight stardom. Anyway, part of it's true. Seberg was an Iowa University student who longed to be a movie star, tried out for and won the lead (beating out a reported 18,000 applicants) in Otto Preminger's Saint Joan (1957). The attendant publicity was voluminous, but the picture flopped. She got a more colorful, and disturbing, role as the manipulative teenage temptress in Preminger's Bonjour Tristesse (1958), and followed that with a lead in Jean-Luc Godard's seminal New Wave picture, Breathless (1959). Petite and pert, the elfin Seberg projected definite star quality, but the public-at least, the American publicwasn't buying. She remained in Europe and enjoyed a moderately successful film career there, including two films with Claude Chabrol, La Ligne de démarcation (1966) and The Road to Corinth (1967), returning to the U.S. during the late 1960s. Back in Paris, Seberg, who was married to director François Moreuil and novelist-cum-filmmaker Romain Gary, was found dead under mysterious circumstances. It was later suggested that the unstable, emotionally fragile characters she sometimes played (most effectively in 1964's Lilith might have reflected more of the offscreen Seberg than audiences could have suspected.
 

OTHER FILMS INCLUDE: 1959: The Mouse That Roared 1960: Let No Man Write My Epitaph 1962: Playtime 1966: A Fine Madness, Moment to Moment 1969: Paint Your Wagon, Pendulum 1970: Airport, Macho Callahan 1976: The Wild Duck
 

Copyright ©1994 Leonard Maltin, used by arrangement with Signet, a division of Penguin Putnam, Inc.