Delphine Seyrig (1932 - 1990) was a French stage and film actress and film director
Delphine
Seyrig made her name by incarnating, as she puts it, “a sophisticated,
inaccessible woman, a dream who is not the true ideal because she doesn’t do the
washing up.”
Outside her
spacious living room one can the laughter and chatter of the women who
participate in her feminist activities. She launches into an explanation of feminism
which, when she discovered it, was a catalyst that gave her the confidence to
express all the she had intuited and bottled up.
“It starts
off when you’re a little girl. You are almost born angry. You notice the
difference between little boys and girls. At school, you learn that everything has
been created and invented by men. I knew I had to smile, be mischievous and
pretty. People had a low opinion of my intelligence. When I tried to speak about
things that were important to me I was told it was nonsense. So I became
superficial in order to please. I saw a choice before me, although I couldn’t
formulate it: to rebel right from the start, or to say to myself, ‘In order to
survive, I must become what others want me to be. Otherwise I will be crushed. It’s
evident that people aren’t interested in me,
so to be recognized I will exist for others. In myself I am nothing.’ I chose
the latter course and succeeded in giving the image that men wanted, always
with a nagging feeling of disquiet.”
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