Celebrity Spotlight- Jane Seymour |
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Starting out as a professional ballerina, Jane Seymour switched to acting after an injury ended her dancing career. Since then, she has starred in numerous television shows, movies, and plays, including the miniseries War and Remembrance, the feature film Wedding Crashers, and Shakespeare’s Macbeth. She even played a Bond girl in Live and Let Die. As the strong-willed Dr. Michaela Quinn in the 1990s television series, Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, Jane won two Emmys and a Golden Globe and gained a large following of loyal fans. Somehow, while acting almost nonstop, Jane has also competed on Dancing with the Stars, written nine books, and become an accomplished watercolor and oil painter. Most recently, she’s collaborated with Kay Jewelers on a collection of jewelry called “Open Hearts,” based on one of her signature paintings. Despite her hectic schedule, she even found time to talk with us. DOGS
When Jane lived in England, she had two English golden retrievers, Krispen and Bungey. Bungey was named after a famous dog who once lived at her thousand-year-old English country house. The original Bungey delivered messages from the house to the court of Queen Elizabeth I. “Bungey never disclosed the contents of the messages, unlike other members of the court,” Jane says. “So we named our first dog Bungey in honor of that dog.” Jane sometimes took the dogs on location when she was working on Dr. Quinn. “Everybody brought their dogs and left them in the production office,” she says. “There were more dogs than people. You couldn’t get into the office because of the dogs.” CATS
They didn’t want to live without pets, so they decided to adopt feral cats. “We bring the cutest little kittens ever to our veterinarian, and we get them their vaccinations and preventive medicine,” Jane says. “We treat them like domestic cats. We don’t declaw them, but we try to keep them away from the upholstery— not always with much success.” Jane adopted two kittens in October 2006 when she was working on a TV show called Justice. “We were filming in L.A., and an actor from the show arrived on the set with the two most adorable little white kittens with gray markings. He had found them on Hollywood Boulevard, but couldn’t keep them because he lived in an apartment and wasn’t allowed to have pets,” she says. “I have twin boys, and ‘twin’ kittens sounded very appealing to me.” Jane and her family raised the kittens, Stashy and Chitters, in their house. “We cuddled them and fed them, and they became domesticated,” she says. “And then when they’d had all their vaccinations, we let them outside and they learned how to be indoor–outdoor cats.” Stashy definitely seems to prefer being inside and ventures outside only on rare occasions. “We’ve been remodeling the house, and everywhere we go, there’s Stashy,” she says. “He comes out of holes we didn’t even know existed. He either finds some way to sleep inside the house without us knowing, or he sleeps just outside a window. There’s a little alcove that he’s found that he happily sleeps in.” Of the two cats, Stashy has always been friendlier toward people. Named because of the black splash of fur above his mouth that looks like a moustache, Stashy enjoys human attention. “Nobody can believe that a feral cat can be as affectionate as Stashy is. He will come up to you and just want to touch you,” Jane says. KittensJane and her husband, James Keach, have written a series of five children’s books called This One ’n That One, about twin Malibu kittens who live in Catafornia. “We parodied our family and turned the twins into kittens, because the beautiful thing about cats is that it’s not about race or breed—well, for some people it is,” she laughs. “Cats come in all colors and sizes and are loved regardless. We felt that that was our aspiration for human beings, too—that they’d be accepted and loved for who they are, rather than what color they are, or what color their fur is.”
They called the kittens “This One” and “That One” because that’s how Jane and James would refer to their twins. “When I was pregnant, one of the twins would kick more than the other,” Jane explains. “And we’d say things like ‘This one’s bigger than that one’ or ‘That one looks more like your husband than this one.’” The final book in the series is about having a new kitten— a girl—called “The Other On KIDS
Her sons, the twins, have two geckos. They adopted one to help out another boy, who couldn’t take care of it. Then they adopted a second gecko to keep the first one company. The family also has koi. “They are friendly and will feed right out of my hand,” Jane says. “We’ve had them since they were babies.” CHOICES
Jane’s CausesJane spends an enormous amount of time trying to alert people to the plight of less-fortunate human beings. One of her main concerns is the world’s water issues. She explains that people don’t tend to think about water running out. “Water is a major problem here in the Southwest and all over the world,” she says. While working with the American Red Cross to vaccinate children against measles, Jane visited Africa, where she saw firsthand the effects of water scarcity. “In Nairobi, 70% of the population have no water and no sanitation,” she says. Jane is also actively involved in several organizations, including City Hearts, which provides after-school arts programs to disadvantaged children in high-crime areas, and the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation, which is dedicated to curing spinal injury by funding research and to improving the quality of life of people living with paralysis. copywrite: http://www.healthypetmagazine.com/aboutus.htm |
When Krispen and Bungey died, Jane and her husband decided not to bring another dog into their current house in California. “I love dogs, but we realized that our house just has too many people coming in and out every day,” she says.