Delphine Seyrig

Beatrice Loayza, writing for Criterion, likens watching Delphine Seyrig in the films of Alain Resnais and Luis Bunuel to being hypnotised, to reaching out to touch her and grasping emptiness. In Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad she is, in David Hudson's phrase, the film's unattainable object of desire. For Loayza, what truly set her free was a second collaboration with a Belgian director: in Chantal Akerman's Golden Eighties she plays Jeanne Schwartz, a Jewish woman running a clothing shop. There is a documentary she directed as well. By Hudson's account, in Sois belle et tais-toi she asked two dozen French and American actors, Jane Fonda, Ellen Burstyn, Maria Schneider and Louise Fletcher among them, what it was to work in an industry where nearly every creative decision was made by a man.