A beauty who likes acting old and evil
By Harry Harris Inquirer TV Writer
Jane Seymour and Bruce Boxleitner in "East of Eden,"
| "In East of Eden' Cathy
starts out seeming an innocent young girl, but she's actually evil.
. . . By the end she's a very bitter old lady, crippled by arthritis
- paranoid, quite mad." - Jane Seymour In ABC's dramatization of Nobel Prize novelist John Steinbeck's East of Eden, beginning with a three-hour episode at 8 tonight and continuing tomorrow and Wednesday, Jane Seymour co-stars as Cathy Ames. It is, she says, the "nastiest" role she's ever played. She loves it. By telephone from New York, where she's co-starring in a Broadway hit, Amadeus, as Constanze, wife of composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the British-born actress happily ticked off Cathy's misdeeds. "At 15 she seduces a schoolteacher and drives him to suicide, she burns her parents to death, she runs off to become a whore, becomes a mistress, knifes the man, marries, seduces her husband's brother on the wedding night, tries to abort a pregnancy, shoots her husband, walks out on him and her twin sons, becomes a madam "She's entirely evil!" According to one published account, when Miss Seymour - real name, as of her second divorce, Joyce Penelope Wilhelmina Frankenberg Attenborough Planer - finished reading East of Eden, she telephoned her father, a gynecologist in England, to apprise him of what she considered her "best role ever" and added, "I really identify with her." Shuttling between two telephones at her Manhattan apartment, she disclaimed that sentence as "a slight misquote." "I was excited, though, because I thought the role was something I could really get my teeth into. "Cathy is a very complex, a very disturbed woman. "The way I play her, she has many different dimensions. If I succeed, the audience will identify with some parts of her character. "I hope no one in the world is as horrifying - she's truly a monster - but we all have the same evil thoughts." |
One aspect of the eight-hour
"East of Eden" that especially intrigued her was that
Cathy, who later changes her name to Kate, ages from 15 to 50. "I hadn't read the book, but when I was offered the role I read not only the book, but also the journal that Steinbeck kept while he was writing it. Every day I read whatever passages I was filming. I steeped myself in anything Steinbeckian I could find. "I hadn't seen the 1955 movie, but I had it screened for me before I decided to do 'East of Eden.' I didn't want to do a repeat. "I discovered that the film was based on only the last 100 pages. There is no duplication in the first five hours on television. Jo Van Fleet won an Oscar for playing only a small bit of my character. So it's exciting new territory." She's partial to roles that span many years. In Amadeus, Constanze ages from 22 to 45. As the wife of another composer, Johann Strauss, in a mini-series that was imported from England, "The Strauss Family," she went from 17 to 47. In a U.S. mini-series, "The Awakening Land," it was from 17 to 55. "It's marvelous," she said, "to play a character who changes and grows, as human beings change and grow. "It's fascinating to see how people change. "In 'East of Eden,' Cathy starts out seeming an innocent young girl, but she's actually evil. She uses her attributes to get people to do what she wants. "By the end she's a very bitter old lady, crippled by arthritis - paranoid, quite mad. She's unable to go out. She lives in a gray room, a coffin." |
Miss Seymour, who'll be 30 on Feb. 15,
has mismatched eyes (the left one green, the right one brown), but
by any criteria she's a striking beauty. She pooh-poohs her pulchritude. "I've been blessed with good cheekbones and largish eyes, and I try to keep in shape. I'm fit and trim. I'm not on any austerity diet, but I limit myself to one meal a day. "I'm quite happy about the way I look, but I hate the idea
of being obsessed by it. I don't go to beauty parlors. I don't spend
inordinate time in front of a mirror. |
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