If you avoid rush hour and ignore the speed limit, this lush, upper-crust community is an hour and 20 minutes` drive north of Los Angeles. To Jane Seymour, who drives her white Jaguar 10 miles an hour faster than the law allows, it`s light-years away.
Seymour`s bucolic spread here, though modest by local standards, is complete with duck pond, tennis court, greenhouse, swimming pool and three guest houses. She shares the home with her third husband, Hollywood business manager David Flynn, and their children, Katie (”Skates”), 6, and Sean, just turning 3.
Welcoming visitors to the Spanish revival-style house is a greeting in Latin inscribed in tile above the entrance. ”It says something like, `This is the place where I feel the most comfortable in the whole world,` ” Seymour translates. And not for a minute do you doubt her.
The only problem for Seymour is that she doesn`t get to spend much time playing lady of the manor.
SOMEWHERE IN TIME
As one of Hollywood`s busiest actresses, she swaps accents and leaps back and forth through time with each successive role. And because she`s in such demand, Seymour lives countless months on location in far-off locales. Lately, the British-born, Rapunzel-haired actress has probably accumulated more frequent-flyer miles than George Bush. It`s not a coincidence that her personal assistant used to be a travel agent.
But her travels have earned her more than just a handful of airline upgrades. Come next February, she`ll have racked up a staggering 43 hours of original prime-time television work in a little more than a year-that`s more than Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Willis combined. This work has meant a junket to London for ”Jack the Ripper,” a four-hour CBS miniseries with Michael Caine and Armand Assante; an interview in Paris with designer Christian Lacroix for ABC`s summer special ”M & W Men and Women”; and a quick jaunt to the Far East to narrate the four-part PBS documentary ”Japan,” which premiered in April.
ALL WORK, LITTLE PLAY
Not to be forgotten are the recent TV movies in which she portrayed two of the 20th Century`s most imposing women: diva Maria Callas in ”Onassis: The Richest Man in the World,” which was made in Spain, and which earned her an Emmy; and the Duchess of Windsor in ”The Woman He Loved,” made in England.
Yet without doubt, Seymour`s most punishing assignment was for ”War and Remembrance”: nine months on location in Eastern Europe. The $104 million, 30-hour mini-series is the long-awaited sequel to ”The Winds of War” and is expected to air in February on ABC.
Does she ever stop? Not if she can help it. ”My feeling is that you should always be on to the next (role) by the time the first one`s out,” says Seymour. ”You can`t count on one thing and sit back smugly and say, `This is it. This is the one that will make people think I`m a better actress.` ”
Oh, she does take summers off. Always. And Christmas, without fail. These rare holidays are often spent with her family at Flynn`s palatial 15th Century estate, St. Catherine`s Court, outside Bath, England.
But Seymour doesn`t rest for long. She admits she is driven not only when it comes to her career, but also about everything in her life. ”I`m just as driven trying to cook and to decorate my houses,” she confesses. ”I`m decorating three right now. If I had more hours in the day, I`d probably be taking up piano again. My mother has the same energy. We just don`t waste time.”
LISTENING, LEARNING
At work, she propels herself into character studies. ”What I try to do is get inside a person`s way of emoting and reacting and dealing with the situation she`s in,” Seymour says. For the Wallis Simpson part, she listened to tapes of the American divorcee`s voice, noting how it sounded more regal after she`d married the Duke of Windsor than it had before. And she read no fewer than 10 biographies of the woman who shocked England, ”including her book, his book and everybody else`s book.” In preparing for the role of singer Maria Callas, Seymour learned the opera ”Medea” and ”two bits from
`Norma` ” for the scenes in which she had to lip-sync along with Callas`
original recordings.
Seymour says she sometimes overprepares for a role and finds it frustrating when she does so. ”With Maria Callas, it wasn`t her story,” she explains with a sigh. ”It was (Aristotle) Onassis` story and I was given certain scenes to play, the high and low moments of her life with Onassis. So I don`t really feel I played Maria Callas. Wallis was just a very, very small part of her life and they cut a lot out. So on television it can become very glib, and that, to me, is very frustrating. You do a lot of work on these things. You know so much more about the character that you wish you could have scenes to show the world all the stuff you know.”
REMEMBERING `WAR`
Even when preparing to play fictional characters, Seymour does a lot of research. Taking over the part of American Natalie Jastrow, originally played by Ali MacGraw in ”The Winds of War,” called for serious self-examination. Her character, a Jew, is interned by the Nazis.
Seymour vividly recalls her first reaction to the script: ”I was devastated. I burst into tears. The pages were wet.” Even when she read it a second time, the story had the same effect on her. ”My husband who never makes comments on what I do and don`t do in terms of work, said, `Whatever it is you`re reading, you`ll have to do it.` ”
Although she was laden with a certain amount of guilt about accepting a job that would take her away from home for the better part of a year, Seymour was nonetheless inexorably drawn to the part. ”My husband felt my motivation was probably a very deep feeling of needing to do this, more complex than simply wanting to go and act a role.” Apparently, he was right.
Born Joyce Penelope Wilhelmina Frankenberg in 1951, Seymour is half Jewish, but was raised without any religious training. ”Natalie was born Jewish but didn`t practice,” she says. Seymour`s grandfather was Polish, and many of her father`s relatives died in the Nazi concentration camps.
PRISONER OF WAR
Further, her Dutch mother was living on a tea plantation in the Dutch East Indies when World War II broke out. After the Japanese invaded, Seymour`s mother was sent to a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, where she spent 3 1/2 years.
Though her mother rarely spoke of the experience when Seymour was growing up, Seymour quizzed her mother at length about it after she got the part. ”My mother wasn`t in Natalie`s situation at all, but I talked to her about how she related to other women in the camp, how she dealt with punishment, how she dealt with seniority, how she dealt with people who were cheating and people who went crazy and how she dealt with death. The major thing I got from her is that anyone who`s ever been through that never has any self-pity. My mother survived because she just decided to survive.
”You see,” she goes on, ”I glean all that and then it`s in the back of me somewhere. When I play Natalie, I am Natalie. That`s the way I work. And then maybe bits of my mother come out-who knows?-or bits of me come out or bits of something in my imagination.”
IN THE BARRACKS
Much of the location work for ”War and Remembrance” was done in the Auschwitz death camp in Poland. The entire cast, including Sir John Gielgud, who plays Natalie`s uncle, worked without the usual star accommodations of heated trailers. ”We were in the real barracks,” she says. Playing a prisoner, Seymour toiled in subfreezing temperatures in nothing but a thin uniform, wooden clogs and no socks. During this part of the filming, she ate very little and lost so much weight that she eventually developed pneumonia.
”It was so real, I can`t begin to tell you,” she says. In many scenes her only artifice is a cap that makes her head appear shaved. Viennese extras, many of whom had been imprisoned during the war, sometimes broke down and cried.
”One of the men, who always kept his yellow star in his pocket, started sobbing uncontrollably. It never seemed like a movie; it always seemed like real life. I began to feel very proud of my half-Jewish heritage,” she says. The peach-colored, yet-to-be-decorated living room in which Seymour talks is dominated by a large painting of a nude woman standing in a forest, looking over her shoulder. Seymour bought it shortly after she left England and settled in Los Angeles. ”I identified with the woman walking into the forest, into the unknown, and looking back and wondering. `Should I?` ”
BACK TO BASICS
Perhaps the painting serves as a reminder of how far the actress has come. As a child growing up in London, Seymour set her sights on a
professional dance career, but the dream was cut short when her knees gave out. Following her first movie, ”Oh! What a Lovely War,” the film`s director, Richard Attenborough (whose son, Michael, was her first husband), suggested she go back to square one, train her voice and really learn her craft as an actress. So she went to work on BBC radio dramas and in small repertory theater productions, each week playing a different character, from a dim-witted cockney secretary to Ophelia.
Seymour`s big break came when she landed the plum role of sweet, young Solitaire in the James Bond movie ”Live and Let Die.” Seymour`s role as the ”Bond girl” thrust her into the international limelight, where many a young actress before her had catapulted. ”To me it was another acting job,” she recalls. ”They hired me to play a virginal tarot-card princess, so I studied the tarot. I took all this quite seriously. When they tried to create this sort of sex bomb, it was totally bizarre to me and I felt uncomfortable with it.” After the movie opened, Seymour decided that, rather than rely on her beauty and become ”a famous, glamorous movie star and do nude scenes in umpteen movies,” she would develop as an actress.
After traveling to America, she approached television much as she had approached repertory theater, playing a cheerleader in ”Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders” one month, a sadistic mother in ”East of Eden” the next, and a proper Bostonian in ”Captains and the Kings” the third.
PAST TO FUTURE
Hopping from the futuristic (”Battlestar Galactica”) to the historic
(the pioneer-saga ”The Awakening Land”), Seymour never gets stuck in one period for long. In the upcoming ”Jack the Ripper,” for example, she dons a titian wig and Victorian bustles and corsets to play a fictitious newspaper sketch artist who gets involved with one of the prime murder suspects in a case that still fascinates Great Britain and the world.
For a change, Seymour gets to use her natural English accent in the role. She estimates that an average of only one in 10 of her acting roles in the last 12 years has been with an English accent, the rest American. Even Maria Callas, she points out, was born in Brooklyn.
”I like playing different characters,” she says. ”That`s probably why I`ve never done a TV series. I`d probably get bored. I like being very different from me. It`s exciting to safely allow yourself to depict a murderess, a mistress, a whore, or whatever it is. That`s the fun about acting. I don`t think I do it because I`m afraid of who I am. I feel as comfortable about doing that as I feel about being a mother, picking my kids up from school and going to parent-teacher meetings.”
Indeed, in some ways Seymour sounds no different from any other working mother who realized early on that she would be a ”totally horrendous mother if I didn`t have something in my life other than motherhood to stimulate me. I really need my work,” she says.
NO MOTHERLY GUILT
”When I come home and I`m being a mother to them, then it`s special. My kids know who Mommy is. They don`t seem to do any guilt numbers that I see done by other kids whose mothers are with them every single minute.”
As for marriage, Seymour, whose 1986 book, ”Jane Seymour`s Guide to Romantic Living,” was a best-seller, has a unique strategy for keeping hers interesting. When she`s not filming on location, she devotes two days a week to Flynn. On those days, it`s just the two of them, alone in their small home in Los Angeles. The children remain in Montecito.
”David and I decided our happiness together would be the best thing we could ever give our children,” she explains to the curious. ”My children would value that much more than if we lived separately in different houses.” If it sometimes seems that Seymour has life all figured out, that there are no uncertainties in her life, she cautions that it`s only an illusion. ”I attempt it all,” she allows, ”I don`t say I have it all, but I have pretty much everything I could ever want in life.” –
