Joyce Penelope Wilhelmina Frankenberg had no chance of becoming a movie star. But Jane Seymour has been one, almost since she changed her name at 17.

That was 37 years ago. Jane Seymour is 54 and has been in movies and on television since 1969. That was the year of her first movie role in Richard Attenborough's Oh! What a Lovely War. Soon after, she married Attenborough's son, Michael, but was divorced two years later.

Seymour has walked down the aisle four times and is now married to James Keach. They have twin sons, Johnny and Christopher, named after friends Johnny Cash and Christopher Reeve. Seymour has two children and stepchildren from earlier marriages.

But a clutch of children did not keep her from following not only an acting career, but being a spokesperson for the United Nations' children's fund, UNICEF, and an international ambassador for Childhelp USA.

Seymour is also a painter and writer and not only finds time to look after a houseful of cats, but keep them away from her aquarium of rare fish.

She also takes care of several horses, all of which suited her television image as the title character in the Emmy and Golden Globewinning Doctor Quinn, Medicine Woman.

Despite being known as the queen of TV movies in the 1980s and starring in nine mini-series such as Crossings (1986) and War and Remembrance (1988), Seymour has not always got the part.

She auditioned for the lead role in the Australian mini-series Thorn Birds in 1983, but Rachel Ward won the part after producers decided Seymour looked "too vulnerable". She had just given birth to her first son and said her breast milk ran over Richard Chamberlain's chest during the audition.

She was not so motherly as the fortune-teller Solitaire, the Bond girl opposite Roger Moore in Live and Let Die (1973).

" My kids are very cool." she says. "They're very non- Hollywood and very unspoiled.

"They've been in Africa with me in Nairobi, and seen people with no running water and they know I'm very involved in making documentaries and doing other things than acting.

" And I'm really proud of them. They make good choices, but I'm not on top of them all the time. They go to college and make their own choices.

"If kids see you passionate about what you do. working hard at it, being disciplined about it. being responsible about choices you make in life and being nice to people - or being part of the community - I think some of that rubs off on them."

Seymour doesn't think you can tell children they have to do this or that if they see you behaving in a different way.

"And nor have I ever been involved in any kind of religious cult." she says. "I'm not religious at all. If you had to describe me as anything, I'd say that I am spiritual. I do believe there's something greater than us, definitely. I don't personally believe it resides in any one particular cult or religion.

"What's more. I actively encourage my kids not to get into my career. But my eldest, Katie, graduated from Columbia University with honors a year early. then took acting lessons in New York and worked in a bar to pay for it. Now she's acting here in LA and just did her first movie piece.

"She also produces and actually worked on the documentary film for Star Wars. I'm very proud of Katie, as I am of all my kids. I just hope that as a role model I'm OK for my kids even if I'm not perfect. I don't think they'll get married as often as me - hopefully."

Seymour recently filmed another comedy, Blind Guy.

"I play a very intellectual psychiatrist with fuzzy. graying hair and very ill-fitting clothes. It's a crazy comedy again. but 1 play a very mousy -looking woman with another side to her.

"I enjoy proving that I can play different characters." she says.

Should the Hollywood roles ever dry up, the actor continues to earn a lucrative rental income from her 14th-century manor in Bath in the west of England. She says tile manor has become famous since Radiohead recorded their OK Computer album there.

"And we've just had New Order there and the Cure did two albums there as well." she says.

"We're presently doing a major refurbishment. It's had a thousand years of deferred maintenance that needed to be taken care of- literally. We've been pulling out the floorboards with the historic Houses Society staring at our every move."

©July 21, 2005 Weekend