Biography Of Léa Seydoux

Léa Seydoux

(born 1 July 1985, height 5' 6" (1,68 m)) is a French actress and model. Along with award-winning performances in French cinema and television, she has appeared in major films including Inglorious Basterds, Robin Hood, Midnight in Paris, and Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol. In 2013 she shared the Palme d'Or prize at the Cannes Film Festival for the film Blue is the Warmest Color. It was announced early 2014 that Lea will be nominated for the Rising Star Award of the BAFTAs.

Early life

Léa Seydoux is the daughter of businessman Henri Seydoux and Valérie Schlumberger. She has five younger siblings and an older sister, Camille. Seydoux was born in the Parisian district of Passy, but grew up in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Her parents divorced when she was a small child. Through her family involvement in media and entertainment, Seydoux grew up acquainted with prominent artists such as photographer Nan Goldin, Lou Reed, and Mick Jagger.

The Seydoux family is widely known in France. Her grandfather, Jérôme Seydoux, is the chairman of Pathé; her granduncle, Nicolas Seydoux, is the chairman of Gaumont Film Company;her other granduncle, Michel Seydoux, also a cinema producer, is currently the chairman of the Lille football club, LOSC; and her father is CEO of the French wireless company Parrot.

Her mother Valérie Schlumberger is a former actress and the founder of the boutique CSAO (Compagnie d'Afrique du Sénégal et de l'Afrique de l'ouest), which promotes the work of African artists, and Seydoux once worked as a model for their jewelry line Jokko. Schlumberger, who lived in Senegal as a teenager, is also the founder of the charitable organization ASAO (Association pour le Sénégal et l'Afrique de l'Ouest).

Seydoux describes her youthful self as short-haired, slightly disheveled, and widely viewed as a bit strange: "People liked me, but I always felt like a misfit." Still concerned for her shyness in adulthood, Seydoux has admitted to having had an anxiety crisis during the 2009 Cannes Film Festival.

Regularly present on the big screen in the 2010s and 2020s with nearly four films shot per year,  Léa Seydoux has earned a reputation for excelling in ambiguous and minimalist acting, in restraint, inviting the viewer to invest themselves in trying to unravel the mystery of her characters. Directors, screenwriters and on-screen partners see in her an actress who does a lot with little, and who makes her scenes richer than they appear through her presence and vulnerability At the beginning of her career, the actress oscillated between two types of characters in particular, "inconsolable melancholic" or "poisonous solar". The precision of her diction, despite the "machine-gun flow" she can adopt is noted, as is her indifference to having to sometimes undress in front of the camera, which she attributes to the fact of having been raised by a mother "with a loving gaze". Her characters are regularly objects of desire, filmed from the point of view of a male fantasy; since the filming of Blue Is the Warmest Colour, however, she has been more attentive to the shots of these nude scenes and checks the shots on the monitor. 

According to her directors, the actress has a timeless physique that would allow her to project all kinds of narrative issues and social origins onto her characters,  and would particularly facilitate her casting in period films, whether she is a maid to Marie Antoinette or a chambermaid. The variety in her choice of films and roles leads The New York Times to recognize that it is difficult to place her in a single register, even if she is always identified with her "presence at once seductive and discreet 

Seydoux is seen as a "director's actress", whose performance closely follows the direction adopted by the film's director to adapt to the chosen style. This approach explains the fact that a large part of her filmography is made up of collaborations with the same people: Wes Anderson (four), Bertrand Bonello (three), Rebecca Zlotowski (two), Ildikó Enyedi (two), Benoît Jacquot (two), Arnaud Desplechin (two). Several directors design or write their films with Seydoux in mind, such as Anderson, Desplechin or Mia Hansen-Løve.She compares her philosophy to a statement by Isabelle Huppert, in which the actress said that she made her own film within each film she made  and considers the actor as co-author of the film in the same way as the director.  The actress does not rely entirely on her instinct, as she continually searches for the character of her character  demanding additional takes to move from one mood to another, and is completely invested in satisfying the director's vision Ursula Meier, who won the Silver Bear in Berlin as a director in Sister, said that "she has a grace, something unique. You can project whatever you want onto her, as a spectator or as a director. That's why she is so desired". 

Seydoux is praised by her versatility and her bold choices as an actor. Yasmin Omar from Curzon wrote in 2024: "You never know what you're going to get when you sit down to watch a Léa Seydoux film. She could be a tattoo-sleeved pothead, a sexually reawakened widow or a gun-toting assassin. She could be a misbehaving nun, a mentally unstable news anchor or a disfigured performance artist". 

The New York Times places Seydoux in a line of actresses that includes Jeanne Moreau and Paulette Goddard. For the Swiss daily Le Temps, the actress, "at ease in blockbusters and art films, with her undeniably feline beauty, a little lunar, even stubborn, and the veil of melancholy tempering the disapproval of her gaze, is as beautiful as a prey as a predator, as common as an aristocrat". The Village Voice sees her as "always captivating", hiding layer after layer of vulnerability. Physically, Libération detects in her "pale similarities to Anna Karina";  for Télérama, her complexion and her blondness evoke the young women in the paintings of Renoir or Botticelli. Her easily recognizable smile, with a space between the two central incisors, also reminded several newspapers of the appearance and presence of Brigitte Bardot.  

Thierry Frémaux, general delegate of the Cannes Film Festival, where Seydoux was one of the most frequent guests in the 2010s, states that she "owes nothing to a recognized lineage, she came out of nowhere and remains unpredictable, inventing herself, according to her wishes, the multiple requests of which she is the subject: from pure French auteur cinema to American blockbusters. Léa is Brigitte Bardot, plus Juliette Binoche, plus Kate Moss, and sometimes all three at the same time". 

Seydoux says she is a big admirer of Catherine Deneuve, whose acting she considers "full of instinctive intelligence and self-mockery" and Isabelle Huppert, for the same intelligence, culture and sensitivity.  In return, Deneuve sent her congratulations in 2022 for her role in The Story of My Wife.  In interviews, Seydoux says she watches few films, and generally films that are not from contemporary cinema such as her favourite film, A Place in the Sun by George Stevens She mentions Stanley Kubrick, Ingmar Bergman, Robert Bresson, Éric Rohmer and Pedro Almodóvar as her favourite directors.

Seydoux's godfather is footwear designer, Christian Louboutin. 

Seydoux lives in Paris.  She has been in a relationship with André Meyer since 2013 They have one child. 

In the wake of the Harvey Weinstein sexual abuse cases and the MeToo movement in 2017, she accused Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault. 

In 2019, Reader's Digest named her in their list of "Amazing French actresses in film history".In 2020, Seydoux was included on Vogue's list of "The most beautiful French actresses of all time".  In 2022, she was made a Dame of the National Order of Merit by the French government 

In July 2021, Seydoux missed the 74th Cannes Film Festival, where she had four films at that year's selection, due to testing positive for COVID. In September 2023, Seydoux was absent from the premiere of The Beast at the 80th Venice International Film Festival, in support of the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. 

In June 2024, Seydoux signed a petition addressed to French President Emmanuel Macron demanding that France officially recognise the State of Palestine. 

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