Brunette, green-eyed Louise Marie Odette Bourdin-Perrier was born in Néris-les-Bains, in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region of southeast-central France. Her brother, Roland Bourdin, became a noted playwright, the first administrator of the Orchestre de Paris, as well as a co-founder of the Ensemble orchestral de Paris.

Leaving school at the age of sixteen, Lise learned typing and shorthand in preparation for her move to Paris where she found work at a radio station. Before long, her good looks got her noticed for a position as a saleswoman for the couturier Pierre Balmain. Lise rapidly progressed from there to becoming a top fashion model, featured in magazines like Harper's Bazaar, Marie-Claire and Noir et Blanc. Between 1946 and 1950, she was the most photographed model in France. In addition, Lise featured in two articles in Life magazine, a fact of which she was immensely proud, later saying "Few French women have had two pages in Life. There was Bardot, Moreau and me." During a subsequent sojourn to the United States, she was 'discovered' on the catwalk, while showcasing French couture, by producers David L. Loew and Charles Einfeld. Two years later, she was back in New York as a model, but now at a base salary of $25 an hour.

Lise had just a brief fling with the stage, but soon commanded leads in post-war French cinema, beginning with Léonide Moguy's social-realist drama Les enfants de l'amour (1953). She was also featured alongside Sophia Loren in Nehir kızı (1954), then played a nice princess in an episode of Sherlock Holmes (1954) and an evil one in the adventure film La rivière des trois jonques (1957). On the international scene, she was a 'Madame X' in Billy Wilder's romantic Gary Cooper-Audrey Hepburn comedy Öğleden sonra aşk (1957), filmed on location in Paris. Her final picture was the dour Van Johnson war film Yıldırım Harbi (1959) , in which Lise's presence was, at best, perfunctory. After that, she quit the acting profession, declaring "I told myself that I would never have the career I deserved, so I stopped."

Lise Bourdin was formerly married to Brazilian industrialist Roberto Seabra. From 1974, she was in a relationship with the French politician Raymond Marcellin (1914-2004), a former Interior Minister of France under the presidency of Charles de Gaulle.