JANE SEYMOUR
It's a snap for this beautiful actress to move from the far-flung future
to "Somewhere in Time."
by Alan Brender
--
"Do you want to know the real story about my role in Battlestar Galactica?
... First of all, that two-hour movie for TV was shot and reshot, and
in the end it no longer resembled the original script at all. When I accepted
the role I was handled a script in which my character was similar in some
ways in strength to Jane Fonda's character in The China Syndrome. I was
playing a news media reporter who was announcing that everything was being
destroyed. She went through traumas there, trying to fight for the rights
of the people who were surviving and then realizing half-way through the
film that she had the equivalent of galactic cancer. None of this was
shown in the final version. They just turned into into a hardware kind
of thing.
"I had a wonderful role, and I played the whole thing like a woman
who was dying. Then they called up my agent (I had died, mind you, in
the film) and said they would like me to do the series. He said: 'Well,
she is not doing the series. I told you just one two-hour episode, and
that's it. Besides, her character is dead.' They said, 'Well, she's not
dead.' 'How can she not be dead?' he replied. 'She wandered around looking
sick through most of the movie. She was always seeing doctors and talking
about who she would leave child to.'
"They assured us Serina hadn't died; so we went off to see the film.
I absolutely could not believe it. They had cut out every scene I had
ever talked in. They had all the other characters talking to me and saying
things. And they cut to moments when I wasn't looking so pained. My character
made no sense at all. I couldn't believe what they had done. There were
things happening to me that I had never seen.
"They then said, 'Well, we just have to have her back. What will
it take to get her?' I was so angry, I said, 'More. More deniro.' I also
said that if I came back there had to be an interesting plot. They said,
'Oh yes, we will make it more fascinating... we have three days to do
it in.' They tried to do with me in the next two hours what they would
have liked to have done in two years."
Seymour emphasizes that she never had any intentions of doing the Battlestar
Galactica series. "They conned me into doing the second two hours
because they completely ruined the characterization of the character I
was doing in the first. I have never been in a series. I don't want to
have to do what Christopher Reeve supposedly has to do to cast over the
Superman image. No one knows who I am."
Actually, the last sentence has proven to be not absolutely true. While
visiting a friend in New York, the child of that friend stared and started
at her and finally said, "Serina."
"And then," Seymour explains, "the little boy said, 'Oh,
please kiss me good-night.' His mother said, 'Please do.' So I went to
kiss him good- night, and the boy clung to me in absolute horror and said,
'Don't die, Mommy. Don't die.' He totally identified with Boxey. I suddenly
realized there was an enormous public out there."
[end of excerpt]
From Starlog #40 (Nov. 1980)