On paper, Jane Seymour can sound a little dauntingly perfect. Mother of six, professional speaker, painter, author, home-furnishings-line designer, fund-raiser, stunningly beautiful actress. In reality, she's just plain inspiring with a down-to-earth, bustling Britishness about her, and an infectious energy.
Yet after 35 years of acting success, why run so fast? Call it gratitude, and keeping a promise. As Jane's the first to admit she's dealt with plenty of adversity.
"I unfortunately have had three divorces," Seymour explains, "lost all of my money at one point through a divorce, lost my father to cancer, lost my own health on three occasions where I nearly died--once where I actually left my body--I've had back surgery, all kinds of things."
The 5-foot-4-inch brunet's life-changing moment came in 1988 in Madrid, when she received an antibiotic shot for severe bronchitis and went into anaphylactic shock.
"I saw this white light," she recalls, "and I was very calm, and I was in the top corner of the room looking down at myself. There I was lying on this bed, half naked, with huge syringes in my backside. This guy was screaming "Emergency! Emergency!" and trying to get ambulances, trying to resuscitate me." She watched herself, thinking, "That's really weird! That's me. Who is this?" And that's when she made the promise.
"I remember saying, "God if you exist, I will never doubt your presence. And I'm going to just be the best person I can possibly be for the rest of the time I have life. Because I want to give back. I am so grateful to be alive, to be back in my body and have use of it."
After an ordeal like that, she explains, "You're a little bit excessively grateful for life, and you don't want to waste a minute of it."
Jane's philosophy is to embrace change, not fight it. She sees life like a giant ocean wave that crests and then crashes, always with the same magnificence, regrouping, moving in a circular fashion. This wisdom about life's natural ups and downs has been ingrained in her over time.
"From day one, I realized it wasn't about what you did easily in life. It's about what you have had to overcome."
When Jane started school she was asked to stand aside from most of her classmates with a group of other children. It was not, as she first thought, because she was special, but because she had a speech impediment and flat feet.
"I used to say, "Awound the wugged wocks the wugged wascals wan." Yet she now does voice-overs for cartoons and documentaries. Ballet school fixed her feet, and she even danced with the Kirov Ballet at Covent Garden, although knee injuries at 17 sidelinded her chances for a professional dancing career.
Jane's mother, Mieka, 91, worked with the Red Cross. Her father was an obstetrician/gynecologist and when he worked weekend shifts at hospitals, the family went along too. At age six, Jane shaped raw cotton wool into balls, cut up lint squares, and repaired operating gowns. "I'm sure they created some of those jobs to make us feel useful," she laughs. Years later, her big reward was being allowed to help out in the preemie ward. Not surprisingly, she has enormous respect for nurses. She is also a big advocate of alternative medicine, which she experienced with her father after his doctors gave up on him and said he was going to die.
"His legs and bones were riddled with cancer," Jane explains. "He was like a skeleton in a wheelchair with no hope and no sense of life.
Although he was skeptic, she sent him literature from a California clinic. To her astonishment, he was keen to go. Incredibly, he seemed revived by a week of treatments that included vitamin-C injections and a macrobiotic diet.
"All I know," she says, "is I saw him change from a man who was pretty gray and a dead person in a wheelchair, and skeletally thin, with no reason or hope or desire to live or communicate with any member of his family to, within a week, getting out of the wheelchair and walking around at Sea World."
My thanks to Alysia and Sarah for the article and photos. © Every Woman Magazine
