The daughter of Francion Garreau-Dombasle and Jean-Louis Sonnery de Fromental, a silk manufacturer, Dombasle and her brother, Gilbert, were raised in Mexico by their maternal grandparents after their mother died in 1964. (Her father later married a painter, Laurence de Lubersac.) Her maternal grandfather, Maurice Garreau-Dombasle, was a close friend of and advisor to Charles de Gaulle and served as the French ambassador to Mexico. Her maternal grandmother was Man'Ha Dombasle (née Germaine Massenet, 1898-1999), a writer and poet who translated Rabindranath Tagore's works into French and was a longtime friend of the science fiction writer Ray Bradbury, who dedicated to her his 1972 novel The Halloween Tree.
Her family surname was created in 1912, when Dombasle's grandfather René Sonnery (1887—1925), an industrialist from Lyon, married Anne-Marie Berthon du Fromental. She took Dombasle as her professional surname in honor of her mother.
She was raised in Mexico and also at Château de Chaintré, the Sonnery family's estate near Saumur, Maine et Loire
Dombasle embarked on a singing career and acting after attending the Conservatoire Musique de Paris and further studies in Mexico.
She has appeared in several Hollywood English-language productions, but most of her acting work has been in French, as are her albums. She also has directed and written the scripts for two films, Les Pyramides Bleues and Chassé-croisé. Renowned for her beauty, she has described her looks as "a Crazy Horse dancing girl", a reference to the famous strip-tease cabaret in Paris.
Formerly married to a man who Vanity Fair magazine described as a "Jewish playboy society dentist 32 years her senior,", she has been, since 1993, the third wife of French philosopher and writer Bernard-Henri Lévy. She has two stepchildren, Antonin-Balthazar Lévy and Justine Lévy, a novelist. Her brother, Gilbert Sonnery (aka Gilbert Sonnery Garreau), is a textile executive, having been chairman of J. B. Martin Ltée and vice chairman of the French holding company MRM.
