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Wed 7 January 2026 17:15, UK
While it’s not impossible, stars are very rarely made with their first performance. Clint Eastwood is one of the biggest stars in Hollywood history, and he’d been working for over a decade before he finally broke through as the iconic figurehead of Sergio Leone’s Dollars trilogy.
As often tends to be the case, there are exceptions. Edward Norton in Primal Fear, Natalie Portman in Léon: The Professional, Kate Winslet in Heavenly Creatures, Julie Andrews in Mary Poppins, and James Dean in East of Eden are among those who exuded star quality in their credited feature debuts, but it doesn’t happen all that often.
The worst-case scenario is when a complete novice is thrown in at the deep end and left to fend for themselves in a role they’re completely unqualified to play, especially when it’s a high-profile project from a known filmmaker with an ensemble cast of veterans, which can leave a newcomer feeling like a deer in the headlights.
She would rebound several years later by playing the female lead in Jean-Luc Godard’s seminal Breathless before becoming an iconic figure in the ‘French New Wave’ movement, but that’s exactly what happened to Jane Seberg when she was plucked from obscurity to headline Otto Preminger’s 1957 period piece, Saint Joan.
The director launched a nationwide talent search to find his Joan of Arc, and after being submitted by a neighbour, Seberg made her first film appearance after beating out 18,000 other contenders by playing the title character in a film that was eviscerated by critics, most of whom savaged her performance.
The star’s two overriding memories of Saint Joan were “being burned at the stake in the picture” and “being burned at the stake by critics,” with Seberg admitting that she was “scared like a rabbit and it showed on the screen,” and being asked to carry a film of that size in her maiden outing was “not a good experience at all.”
A dozen years later, she worked with Eastwood on Paint Your Wagon, and he still felt sorry for her. “Taking an inexperienced person and putting her in that kind of bad project, under that kind of pressure, it’s terrible,” he told Paul Nelson. “No matter how much a person looks like she’s right for the part, there’s just so much a person can do. If you’re not any good, then how can anything else be good?”
He was adamant that there was “no way an inexperienced young gal like that would be able to do that,” suggesting “it was just a Preminger fantasy going on.” More than that, he was wary of the long-term effects it could have had on not only Seberg’s career, but her confidence in her abilities.
“You get a reputation as being bad,” Eastwood explained. “It’s not that you’re really bad, you just have never had a chance to be good in the normal stepping of things. It was too bad she hadn’t gotten some smaller roles.” It was an unfortunate way to kick off her big-screen tenure, but by the end of the 1960s, Seberg had more than washed away the ignominy of Saint Joan.
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