Delphine Seyrig was born in Lebanon to a French family of Alsatian background. She spent the war years attending school in the United States, began acting in small Paris theater troupes in the early '50s, and returned to the U.S. in 1956. She acted in a number of New York off-Broadway productions, including “Song Of Songs” by Giraudoux, “Henry IV” by Pirandello, and “Enemy Of The People” by Ibsen. It was in this last play that Alain Resnais, visiting New York in connection with the opening of Hiroshima Mon Amour, saw her for the first time and decided he wanted her for the lead in a film he was planning to make, The Adventures Of Harry Dickson. While in New York, Delphine Seyrig also appeared in the noted New American Cinema short by Robert Frank, Pull My Daisy. The Adventures Of Harry Dickson was never made, but Resnais' next film - Last Year At Marienbad (1961) - made Seyrig an internationally acclaimed screen actress. As David Thomson has noted: “...That film is sustained by the grace of her movements and the emotional alertness of her expressions: a more hackneyed or less resourceful actress could never have carried the constant, but non-specific attention.... She is a Proustian actress in the way she is able to invest small gestures with an enormous imaginary train.” Most recently, Seyrig applied her genius for breaking down drama to movement and gesture in Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman. The implicit feminism of the Seyrig/Akerman collaboration is supported by Seyrig's creative association with Marguerite Duras (India Song, La Musica) and Liliane de Kermadec (Aloise), as well as by her off-screen commitment to the women's movement.
