Delphine Seyrig
Related: actress - French cinema
Last Year at Marienbad (1961) - Alain Resnais [Amazon.com]
image sourced here.
Biography
Delphine Seyrig (April 10, 1932 - October 15, 1990) was a stage and film actress and a film director.
Born Delphine Claire Belriane Seyrig in Beirut, Lebanon, she was the daughter of an archeologist and the brother of composer Francis Seyrig. As a young lady, she studied acting at the Comédie de Saint-Etienne, training under Jean Dasté, and at the Centre Dramatique de l'Est. She also studied at the Actors Studio in New York City where, in 1958, she appeared in her first film, Pull My Daisy. She returned to France in 1960 and was hired by director Alain Resnais to star in his film, L'Année dernière à Marienbad. Her performance brought her international recognition.
During the 1960s and 1970s, Delphine Seyrig worked with some of the best directors in the film industry including François Truffaut, Marguerite Duras and Alain Resnais. She became one of Europe's most respected actors both on stage and in film, and was named best actress at the Venice Film Festival for her role in the 1963 film, Muriel. Her range was such that she played many diverse roles, and because she was fluent in French, English, as well as in German, she appeared in films in all three languages, including a number of Hollywood productions.
Through the years, Seyrig used her celebrity status to promote women's rights. Of the three films she directed, her most important was the 1977 production Sois belle et tais-toi (Look Beautiful and Keep Your Mouth Shut) that included actresses, Shirley MacLaine, Maria Schneider and Jane Fonda, amongst others, speaking frankly about the level of sexism they had to deal with in the film industry. In 1982 Seyrig was a key member of the group that established the "Centre Audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir" in Paris 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 festival tribute at the Créteil International Women's Film Festival, France.
She was married to the American painter, Jack Youngerman (born 1926) who had studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. She died in Paris in 1990 and was interred there in the Cimetière du Montparnasse. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphine_Seyrig [May 2005]
Sois belle et tais-toi (1981) - Delphine Seyrig
-
Sois belle et tais-toi (1981) - Delphine Seyrig
[imdb.com]
Outline: Famous actresses talk about their role in the movie industry, and the demand to "be beautiful and shut up". --via imdb.comCredited cast: Jenny Agutter .... Herself Juliet Berto .... Herself Ellen Burstyn .... Herself Candy Clark .... Herself Patti D'Arbanville .... Herself R. de Gregorio .... Herself Marie Dubois .... Herself Louise Fletcher .... Herself Jane Fonda .... Herself Luce Guilbeault .... Herself Shirley MacLaine .... Herself Mallory Millet-Jones .... Herself Mady Norman .... Herself Millie Perkins .... Herself Rita Renoir .... Herself Telias Salvi .... Herself Maria Schneider .... Herself Barbara Steele .... Herself Susan Tyrrell .... Herself Viva .... Herself Anne Wiazemsky Cindy Williams
- Last Year at Marienbad (1961) - Alain Resnais
One of the most ferociously iconoclastic and experimental films of the French New Wave, Alain Resnais's 1961 feature, winner of the grand prize at that year's Venice Film Festival, is based on a script by Alain Robbe-Grillet. At its center is what seems to be a simple but unanswerable puzzle: Did its protagonist (Giorgio Albertazzi) have an affair the year before with a woman (Delphine Seyrig) he just met (or possibly re-met) at his hotel? The inquiry becomes an unsettling experiment in flattening the dimensions of past, present, and future so that any difference between them becomes meaningless, while Resnais's coldly formal but oddly dreamlike geometric compositions make space itself seem a function of subjective memory. Add to that Resnais's trademark tracking shots--long, smooth, a visual correlative of a wordless feeling--and this is a film that truly gets under the skin in almost inexplicable ways. One of the most influential works of its time. --Tom Keogh - Daughters of Darkness (1971) - Harry Kümel [DVD, Amazon US]
[FR] [DE] [UK]
Art-movie goddess Delphine Seyrig (Last Year at Marienbad) slinks through the plush Eurotrash settings as the deathless Elizabeth Bathory, Vampire Countess, in Harry Kümel's minor Dutch classic of lesbian erotic-gothic. Blood mingles with water during the languorous shower scenes. Set at an upper-crust seaside resort, the 1971 film recounts Bathory's plot to replace her current consort (Andrea Rau) with a fresher specimen, an abused newlywed whose brutal young husband is an inconvenience waiting to be eliminated. Although both the bi-sex and the neck-biting violence are tame by today's standards, the film has a graceful, gliding sense of pace that gets under your skin; something unspeakably kinky always seems to be just about to happen. It never quite does, but the mood lingers. See it with someone you love--or would like to. --David Chute for Amazon.com
your Amazon recommendations