Jane Seymour (actress)

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Jane Seymour

Jane Seymour on the red carpet at the Emmy Awards September 11, 1994, photo by Alan Light
Birth name Joyce Penelope Wilhelmina Frankenberg
Born February 15, 1951 (age 55)
Hayes, Hillingdon, England, UK
Height 161 cm (64 in)
Official site www.janeseymour.com
Notable roles Solitaire, Live and Let Die
Serina, Battlestar Galactica
Elise McKenna, Somewhere in Time
Dr. Quinn, Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman
Kathleen Cleary, Wedding Crashers
Emmy
 Awards		 Onassis: The Richest Man in the World
Spouse(s) James Keach 1993-present
David Flynn 1981-1992
Geoffrey Planer 1977-1978
Michael Attenborough 1971-1973

Jane Seymour OBE (born Joyce Penelope Wilhelmina Frankenberg on February 15, 1951) is an English-born actress probably best known today as the star of the TV series and film Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman.

Contents

[edit] Biography

[edit] Early life

Born in Hayes, Hillingdon, England to John Frankenberg, a British Jewish obstetrician of Polish and German origin and his Dutch wife Mieke van Trigt, she took the stage name of Jane Seymour at the age of 17.

[edit] Acting career

She has had a long career in both film and television, beginning in 1969 with an uncredited role in Richard Attenborough's film version of Oh! What a Lovely War. Soon afterward she married Attenborough's son, Michael Attenborough. Her first major film role was as Lillian Stein, a Jewish woman seeking shelter from the Nazis with a Danish Christian family in the 1970 war drama The Only Way.

From 1972 to 1973 she played her first major TV role as Emma Callon in the successful 1970s series The Onedin Line. During this time she appeared as female lead Prima in the two-part TV mini-series Frankenstein: The True Story and as Winston Churchill's lover Pamela Plowden in another of her father-in-law's films, Young Winston. She also drew her first major international attention as Bond girl Solitaire in the James Bond film Live and Let Die.

Seymour divorced Michael Attenborough in 1973. She then took only two minor TV roles until cast as Princess Farah in Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger, the third part of Ray Harryhausen's Sinbad trilogy, in 1975. (The film was not released, however, until its stop motion animation sequences had been completed in 1977.) For the remainder of the 1970s, she played minor TV roles. In 1978 she played Serina in the Battlestar Galactica motion picture, and then in the first two episodes of the series that followed, until she was killed off, with the role being one of her most memorable minor TV roles. In 1981 she was in the TV movie version of John Steinbeck's East of Eden.

In 1980, Seymour returned to the big screen in the comedy Oh Heavenly Dog opposite Chevy Chase and as Elise McKenna in Somewhere in Time opposite Christopher Reeve. Following her appearance opposite Tom Selleck in the unsuccessful 1984 film Lassiter, however, she made no further major movie appearances until 2005.

Jane Seymour at the 40th Emmy Awards, August, 1988, photo by Alan Light
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Jane Seymour at the 40th Emmy Awards, August, 1988, photo by Alan Light

Next, Seymour won the female lead in the epic twelve-part TV miniseries, War and Remembrance (1988), in which she played Natalie Henry, an American Jewish woman trapped in Europe during World War II. The series was based on the successful novel by Herman Wouk, and is noted for its accurate and graphic depiction of the Holocaust.

In 1989, as part of the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution, she appeared in a lavish television movie series called La révolution française (filmed in both French and English.) Seymour appeared as the doomed French queen, Marie Antoinette, her two children — Kathryn and Sean — appeared as the queen's children.

Seymour continued to take numerous roles in TV movies and series, most notably as Dr. Michaela Quinn in the TV series and movie Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman (1993-2001), through which she met her present husband, director James Keach. It is well known that while filming the 1996-1997 season, Seymour allowed British rock group Radiohead to record their hit album OK Computer at her mansion. In 2004 she made several guest appearances in the hit WB Network series Smallville, playing the role of Genevieve Teague, the wealthy, scheming mother of Jason Teague (Jensen Ackles). She also made a grand appearance on Law & Order SVU.

She returned to the big screen again in 2005 with the major role of Kathleen Cleary, wife of Treasury Secretary William Cleary (Christopher Walken), in the hit comedy The Wedding Crashers. She returned to TV in the short lived WB series Modern Men, broadcast in spring 2006.

Seymour was named an OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire) by Queen Elizabeth II on New Year's Eve, 1999. She became a U.S. citizen on February 11, 2005.

In fall 2006, Seymour guest-starred as a law-school professor on an episode of the CBS sitcom How I Met Your Mother.

[edit] Marriages and children

[edit] Awards

Preceded by:
Piper Laurie
Promise		 Emmy Award Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Miniseries or a Movie
1988
Onassis: The Richest Man in the World		 Succeeded by:
Colleen Dewhurst
Those She Left Behind

[edit] Notable films

[edit] Trivia

  • Her eyes are different colours. Her right eye is hazel brown and her left eye is green. (See Heterochromia.)
  • Thanks to her mother, she is fluent in Dutch as well as English.
  • The music bands The Cure and Radiohead (OK Computer) have recorded at her house in England.
  • During filming of Live and Let Die, she went to a tarot reader. The reader looked at the cards, and told Jane that she would marry again three times. Jane was shocked, because she had just been married for the first time. She later did marry again three times. She mentions this in the 2000 DVD release of Live and Let Die.

[edit] External links

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