The Emmy-winning "queen of the miniseries "explains why her life is "way beyond any dream I ever had"

"Queen of the miniseries?" asks Jane our, and she smiles tiny perfect rows of white. "Well, it's nice to be queen of something!"

Jane Seymour's claim to the mythical crown appears secure. In addition to ABC's War and Remembrance, concluding its 30 hours in May, Seymour's queenly bio for
the past year includes the role of a flame-haired Victorian artist in CBS' Jack the Ripper and her portrayal of Maria Callas in ABC's The Richest Man in the World. For that role she won the Emmy for outstanding supporting actress in a
miniseries special.

"I was quite astounded to hear about the nomination for Callas," the not-so-plain Jane Seymour says in her lilting English accent. "I thought I
might be nominated for my part as the Duchess of Windsor in the series The
Woman He Loved."

Seymour, Sitting high on her throne, her Emmy as her scepter, is a great
defender of the miniseries. "I believe they are the art form of our time," she
says. "They offer the chance to present to the vast public book adaptations
that they would never otherwise know. I also think they encourage people to
read and reread the classics."

Seymour scorns reminders that her huge successes on the tube outstrip the
successes of her big-screen movies. "Most feature films today are for
17-year-olds, prizefighters, and vigilantes," she says in swift response. "The
best roles are in television."

Yet she turned down the biggest role of her career in War and Remembrance four
times. "I was not prepared to go away from my husband and newborn baby for
filming nine months in Eastern Europe," she says. "Then I read the script-and
cried through the whole night. I couldn't put it down. I was obsessed with it.
Finally my husband turned to me while I was reading-the pages were soggy and
wet-and said, 'As a family we'll have to figure some way to do this.' He's
extraordinarily understanding. We survived that nine months of filming."

Yet the grueling months on location in Eastern Europe filming War and
Remembrance were more than Seymour had counted on: "It was exhausting,
horrendous, and depressing immersing yourself in those terrible times." Seymour
sighs and smooths her blue-and-white polka-dot skirt across her knees-the same
skirt she wore while filming the concentrationcamp scenes. (Like all the
clothes Seymour wears in her films, the skirt is now part of her prized costume
collection.) Hanging over the skirt is a baggy white knit sweater-- "My
husband's"--that drapes her shoulders. Scuffed ballet slippers complete her
int"costume."

Seymour is sitting at a redwood picnic table on the patio of the Santa Barbara,
California, home she shares with her husband, David Flynn. (Flynn is a
financial consultant for top show-biz personalities, including Goldie Hawn and
Warren Beatty.) She is momentarily lost remembering the arduous months of
filming at Auschwitz, the infamous Nazi extermination camp.

She finally says, quietly, "I am very proud to be in War and Remembrance. It
was more than an acting piece; it was a crusade."

In ABC's lavish adaptation of Herman Wouk's novel, Seymour portrays Natalie
Jastrow (originally played by Ali MacGraw in Winds War), an American of Jewish
heritage who finds herself a victim of Hitler's persecution. In the last
episode of War and Remembrance, aired in November 1988, Natalie and her uncle,
played by Sir John Gielgud, found themselves interned in a ghetto, an interim
stop en route to Auschwitz.

"Even now I can't watch the scenes we shot in Auschwitz without trembing,"
Seymour says, wiping a bead of perspiration from her brow. "During the filming
we would lose all comprehension of being human beings. There was a presence in
that place of something horrendous having happened." She shakes her head sadly.
"I swear you could even smell the dead flesh.

"Many of the extras in the film were real survivors of the death camp," Seymour
continues. "Some of them still had the identifying tatoos. Most of them were
Easternbloc Jews who had never been in a movie, and we made everything so real
they believed they were back in camp. In one scene a woman next to me, who had
been interned in Auschwitz at age 26 and survived, had tears rolling down her
face. As we were filming, she looked around and whispered, 'This is real.'"

Seymour says she has memories of stumbling half-naked through scenes in
sub-zero weather. In one instance, she was hosed down with water and left
covering her breasts in a room filled with naked, shaven-headed extras. "You're
so demeaned, you feel like cattle," she recalls.

She shivers slightly as she remembers the reality of the scene: "The women's
heads were really shaved. In the shower scenes everyone was stark naked-even
Sir John Gielgud. Then the gas chamber. . . . I know that Sir John and I, and
the people we worked with on the film, put everything into it. I. . . I am very
proud of the work I did."

She pauses, then adds, "My mother spent four years in a Japanese concentration
camp in Java in World War II."

Seymour's parents-her father a London surgeon, and her mother a Dutch
concentration-camp survivor-named their daughter Joyce Penelope Wilhelmina
Frankenberg. Joyce, early in her career, changed her name to that of Henry
VIII's third wife; now, even her family calls her Jane. Her parents noted that
as a child she was different from her sisters, Sally and Anne. "If Jane wanted
to do something, she didn't ask, she didn't cry, she just did it," the actress'
mother recalls.

What Jane wanted more than anything was to be a ballet dancer, even though she
knew her body was built "totally wrong" for ballet. She is only 5'4", but she
consoles herself: "I have a long neck and carry myself well from dancing, so I
think I look taller.

"I was told early on that I was not built for classical ballet," she says, "but
I was such a high achiever, I made my body do more than it could tolerate." At
age 17, while dancing professionally in Covent Garden with the Kirov Ballet,
she suffered a knee injury that ended the dancing career.

"As a dancer, I was never technically very brilliant," Seymour says. "All the
reviewers said everything happens 'up top.' They would say, 'A fine dancer, and
a very sensitive actress.' Since I couldn't be a dancer, I decided to become an
actress."

Seymour began to perfect her acting craft. In Britain she took to playing every
kind of role she could: a striptease artist in Not Now, Darling; Winston
Churchill's first love in the film Young Winston; and even the classic roles of
Ophelia in Hamlet and Nora in Ibsen's A Don's House. Her big movie break was as
Solitaire, the sex symbol in the James Bond movie Live and Let Die.

Then it was off to America, where she would soon rule as queen of the
miniseries. She languished for a while in such potboilers as Dallas Cowboy
Cheerleaders, until her star quality began to glisten. The actress was
nominated for her first Emmy for her role in the 1976 TV special Captains and
the Kings, but she feels she gave a better performance in the 1981 TV version
of John Steinbeck's East of Eden, in which she portrayed Kate, the venomous
brothel owner.

"Kate haunted me totally," Seymour says. "I really began to feel I was her, and
it took me weeks to get out of her. I had her anger inside of me. It's not a
part I'd like to play every day of the year, as it could destroy my life."

Then came her roles as Hemingway's Lady Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises and
identical twins (one psychotic) in Dark Mirror, followed ' by Crossings and her
more recent successes in 1988. When asked how many miniseries she has been in,
she is genuinely stumped but thinks "around 17."

What is it about this intense English actress that makes her come alive in
front of the TV camera?

Seymour leans forward on the patio table and folds her hands. Her arms are
delicate. "I'm fortunate," she says. "I'm working with an instrument that loves
me. I'm definitely not the prettiest or most beautiful person in the world.
[One smitten cinematographer has disagreed: "Wow-if Bo Derek's a 10, this
lady's a 10-1/2."] There are so many women who are more spectacular looking.
But the camera does find things. If I do nothing, if I don't move my face, if I
just think about something, the camera picks it up and broadcasts it loud and
clear. The camera sucks these things out of me."

One reviewer who had seen her as the evil Kate in East of Eden said: "She was
terrifying. I don't care how pleasant she is in real life; she must have found
something awful inside of her to play ftom."

"I have a lot of people inside me," she acknowledges, "and I am so blessed to
be in a profession where they pay me to discover these people!"

The question seems to ask itself: Do you like yourself on the screen?

"Oh, no! I'm never pleased with anything I've done," she says. "I've always
criticized my acting. I take the whole thing apart."

But she does seem pleased with another product of her talents-her book, A Guide
to Romantic Living, written "more or less to have something to do" when she was
three months pregnant with her second child, Sean.

"I'm not a writer," she I've never taken a writing lesson. I don't know
anything about writing books. But I do know how to express myself, and that's
what I did. I wrote it with anything I could find, which in my house is a
child's crayon."

She excuses herself, rises from the patio table, walks into the house, and
returns quickly with a copy of A Guide to Romantic Living.

"I wrote the book for the person who wants to live romantically," she says.
"Take someone you love and go to the beach, watch the waves roll in . . . don't
wait for a holiday. Surprise the other person. Do it! Whatever your romantic
dream, do it. You see all those cards showing a couple walking the beach at
sunset? Well, don't buy the cards-walk the beach first, then send the card."

In many ways Jane Seymour is living her own romantic fantasy: she has a
handsome husband; two lovely children, Katie and Sean; a 15th-century manor
house, St. Catherine's Court, in the English countryside; and a skyrocketing
career as an actress. "I pinch myself every day," she says. "My life is way
beyond any dream I ever had."

If one movie role captures her romantic, nostalgic image best, it is her
favorite as the turn-of-the-century beauty in Somewhere in That film was very
much me," Seymour says"I'm not sure I believe in a past life, but I feel
comfortable in that era. There's something very strange. . . ."

She opens her book to an oval photograph taken for the movie showing her in a
Victorian dress. Next to it is another oval photograph, a turn-ofthe-century
portrait of Seymour's Dutch grandmother in a similar pose. "My mother found
this picture of my grandmother in the bottom of an old drawer years after I'd
finished the movie. See the amazing similarity?" she asks.

She closes the book, then continues, "Somewhere in Time had an enormous effect
on people and was one of the reasons I wrote my guide to romantic living. I
guess I feel more at home in the Victorian era than I do today."

The door to the patio opens, and a nanny comes out with Jane's two redhaired
children. She hugs the children, then says, "I guess everything is a
compromise. I may never become the world's greatest actress, because I've
gotten married and had children. But I've rarely been disappointed -ultimately."

And does Jane Seymour want to continue acting when she's 80?

"Oh, yes! I must always have something to do with films, television, or
theater. I love it. I thrive on it. Like Helen Hayes and like Ruth Gordon, I
think people who work until they are older are much happier."

Step aside for the "dowager" queen of the miniseries.


Saturday Evening Post 1989