Her Alsatian father, Henri Seyrig, was the director of the Beirut Archaeological Institute and later France's cultural attaché in New York during World War II.

In New York she met director Alain Resnais, who asked her to star in his film Last Year at Marienbad (1961).

Among her roles of this period is the older married woman in François Truffaut's Stolen Kisses (1968).

During the 1960s and 1970s, Seyrig worked with directors including Truffaut, Luis Buñuel, Marguerite Duras, and Fred Zinnemann, as well as Resnais.

She played many diverse roles, and because she was fluent in French, English and German, she appeared in films in all three languages, including a number of Hollywood productions.

was in Chantal Akerman's 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, in which she was required to adopt a highly restrained, rigorously minimalistic mode of acting to convey the mindset of the title character.

The collective produced several videos together, focusing on representations of women in the media, labour, and reproductive rights.

[citation needed] Seyrig married (and was later divorced from) American painter Jack Youngerman (1926–2020),[4] who had studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.