[9][10][verification needed] Seberg died at the age of 40 in Paris, the French police ruling her death a probable suicide.

Gary mentioned how the FBI had planted false rumors in the media that Seberg's pregnancy by Carlos Navarra in 1970 was by a Black Panther, and how the trauma had resulted in her overdosing on sleeping pills while pregnant.

[22] On the failure, she later told the press:I am the greatest example of a very real fact, that all the publicity in the world will not make you a movie star if you are not also an actress.

[23] "The only problem I had at the time was that Columbia insisted I use Jean Seberg…Jean had just done Saint Joan (1957) and Bonjour Tristesse (1958), fresh from her indoctrination by director Otto Preminger into film acting.

[23] She appeared as the female lead in Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (French title: À bout de souffle, 1960) as Patricia, co-starring with Jean-Paul Belmondo.

"[23] She followed with Five Day Lover (L'amant de cinq jours, 1962), Congo vivo (1962) and In the French Style (1963), a French-American film featuring Stanley Baker released through Columbia.

She also appeared in the anthology film The World's Most Beautiful Swindlers (Les plus belles escroqueries du monde, 1963) and Backfire (Échappement libre, 1964), which reunited her with Jean-Paul Belmondo.

[29] In 1966 and 1967, Seberg played the leading roles in two French films directed by Claude Chabrol and co-starring Maurice Ronet.

[32] Seberg also starred in the ensemble disaster film Airport (1970), which drew mixed reviews but was a huge success at the box office.

Seberg was François Truffaut's first choice for the central role of Julie in Day for Night (La Nuit américaine, 1973), but after several fruitless attempts to contact her, he gave up and cast British actress Jacqueline Bisset instead.

She remained active during the 1970s in European films, appearing in White Horses of Summer (Bianchi cavalli d'Agosto) (1975), The Big Delirium (Le Grand Délire, 1975, with husband Dennis Berry) and Die Wildente (1976, based on Ibsen's The Wild Duck[34]).

At the time of Seberg's death, she was working on the French film Operation Leopard (La Légion saute sur Kolwezi, 1980), which was based upon the book by Pierre Sergent.

[10][37] As part of its extended campaign to smear and discredit black liberation and anti-war groups, which began in 1968, the FBI became aware of several gifts Seberg had made to the Black Panther Party, totaling an estimated $10,500 in contributions; these were noted among a list of other celebrities in FBI internal documents later declassified and released to the public under FOIA requests.

[10][37] The FBI operation against Seberg, directly overseen by J. Edgar Hoover, used COINTELPRO program techniques to harass, intimidate, defame, and discredit her.

[9][10] The FBI's stated goal was an unspecified "neutralization" of Seberg with a subsidiary objective to "cause her embarrassment and serve to cheapen her image with the public", while taking the "usual precautions to avoid identification of the Bureau.

[39] In 1970, the FBI created a false story from a San Francisco-based informant that the child Seberg was carrying was not fathered by her ex-husband Romain Gary, as initially claimed, but by Raymond Hewitt, a member of the Black Panther Party.

[45] Seberg held a funeral in her hometown with an open casket that allowed reporters to see the infant's white skin to disprove the rumors, though she later acknowledged that a Mexican student revolutionary, Carlos Navarra, was the actual father.

According to friends interviewed after her death, she experienced years of aggressive in-person surveillance, amounting to constant stalking, as well as burglaries and other means of intimidation.

Seberg's father reacted strongly to the story of FBI abuses, stating that "if this is true, why in the dickens didn't they just shoot her, instead of having all this travail that's gone on.

In 1961 she met French aviator, resistance member, novelist and diplomat Romain Gary, who was 24 years her senior and married to author Lesley Blanch.

[60] Seberg reportedly had affairs with co-stars Warren Beatty (Lilith), Clint Eastwood (Paint Your Wagon) and Fabio Testi (Gang War in Naples), as well as filmmaker Ricardo Franco.

[64] While filming Macho Callahan in Durango, Mexico, in the winter of 1969–70, Seberg became romantically involved with a student revolutionary named Carlos Ornelas Navarra.

[66] Seberg subsequently dated aspiring French filmmaker Jean-Claude Messager, who later spoke to CBS's Mike Wallace for a 1981 profile of the actress.

[55] In 1979, while still legally married to her estranged husband Berry, Seberg went through "a form of marriage" to a 19-year-old Algerian named Ahmed Hasni.

[67] Hasni persuaded her to sell her second apartment on the Rue du Bac, and he kept the proceeds (reportedly 11 million francs in cash), announcing that he would use the money to open a Barcelona restaurant.

[71] On September 8, nine days after her disappearance, Seberg's decomposing body was found wrapped in a blanket in the back seat of her Renault, parked close to her apartment in the 16th arrondissement.

His suicide note, addressed to his publisher, indicated that he had not killed himself over the loss of Seberg, but because he could no longer produce literary works.

[62][83] The 2000 short film Je t'aime John Wayne is a tribute parody of Breathless, with Seberg played by Camilla Rutherford.

The character of Anny Vikland in William Boyd's 2020 novel Trio strongly resembles Seberg's in details of her life and death.

[87] In 2022, Kacey Rohl portrayed Seberg in White Dog (Chien blanc), a film adaptation by Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette of Gary's 1970 book.