Who taught her to open her heart?
The teachers in this actress' life taught her how to live with an open heart.

 

By Jane Seymour, Los Angeles, California
April, 2009- Guideposts

One morning I was painting, and found myself drawing sketches of hearts, but instead of cheering me, they made me sad.

The heart shape seemed too closed. It suggested people cut off from one other, as if to protect themselves from pain. I began to sketch more, and the heart shapes changed. They became more open.

Open hearts, I thought. That seemed right. Because of all the things I’ve done in my life—in my acting career, in my relationships with others—learning to live with an open heart has been crucial. Fortunately, I’ve been blessed with good teachers.

There was my mother, Mieke Frankenberg, one of the most generous, positive people on earth. I grew up in England, the oldest of three girls, and we never knew how many to expect for dinner.

Mummy was always welcoming someone who needed a good meal or a place to stay. “F.H.B” was a standard code in our house: “Family Hold Back.” She was fantastic at making a dinner stretch—it was the whole loaves and fishes parable.

“Things always work out for the best,” she told me and my sisters. Her optimism rubbed off.

Yet she’d endured tremendous hardship when she was young. Born in Holland, she was living in Indonesia at the outbreak of World War II. When the Japanese invaded, she was put in a concentration camp for women and children. The conditions were brutal and food was scarce.

Mummy worked as a nurse solely on the basis of her training as a Red Cross volunteer. She was expected to care for the sickest prisoners and the dying. It must’ve been excruciating work. I know it was heartbreaking.

War ended and she made her way to England, determined not to become embittered by her experience. “As long as you can help someone else,” she explained to us, “you can survive.” She wanted us to know that living with an open heart was a choice, not a consequence of the circumstances you faced.

My father, John Frankenberg, was a doctor, one of the first infertility specialists. He was devoted to his work and his patients. Most weekends he had to be on call at the hospital, which was far from our home in Wimbledon. He didn’t want to be separated from his children, so he made us three girls auxiliary nurses and we joined him at the hospital.

We had our own little uniforms and were assigned rudimentary chores like making cotton balls from huge rolls of cotton or cutting gauze into swabs. We sewed tabs on the back of surgical gowns for the doctors and nurses or, if we were lucky, helped take care of the preemie babies.

Everything about my father’s work fascinated me. He taught us how the body worked and he showed us what happened in an operating room. He didn’t want us to be afraid of blood, and we weren’t. We saw firsthand what commitment and care it took to be a good doctor. If I were better at math, I might have become a doctor myself.

Instead, I became an actress and I did my best to put my parents’ values of hard work and passion in everything I did. I was fortunate to have success early. I moved to California and made some wonderful films (working with Christopher Reeve in Somewhere in Time [1] was a milestone) and made-for-TV movies.

Of course I faced the disappointments and rejections that are part of the business, but I kept a balance in my life by raising my two children, making a real home for them like the one I’d grown up in and loving and supporting my husband.

Then I was hit by two blows. First, the death of my father. He was stricken with cancer and the doctors didn’t think he had much time. I flew back to England to be with him. At the end of his days, we had one wonderful, long conversation where we talked about everything, even about the afterlife. The next day he was gone.

The second devastating blow was the end of my marriage. All the things I had believed about our marriage, all the reasons I had trusted it, proved untrue. I left, taking the children with me. I was completely broke and emotionally devastated. For months I was in a daze. I needed healing but didn’t have any idea where to turn.

One day I went to a charity auction, one of those things I had agreed to in better times. How could I reach out to others? I was the one who needed help. But then I remembered my mother’s words, “As long as you can help someone else…” If I could make a donation to the auction, maybe I’d feel better.

I ended up bidding on having an original portrait done by the artist Tom Mielko and won. He came to my house to paint my children. He saw some pictures in the playroom—finger paintings. “These are terrific,” he exclaimed. “Who did them?”

“I did.” I thought he was teasing.

“Do you paint other things?”

“No,” I said.

“You should learn to paint.”

“I can’t afford art lessons.”

“Let me teach you,” he said. “For free.” I wanted to say no. I needed to get my life back in order. I had to find work soon. I had to make a living. Wouldn’t painting be a waste of time? But something urged me to accept his offer. There was some inner voice, some inner prompting that said, You must do this.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll try.”

Tom taught me how to use watercolors, and every free moment I could find I painted. I went down to the beach and saw the world through new eyes. The golden light on the water, the color of the sand, the shape of the rocks, the blue of the sky, I tried to capture them on paper.

Talking to lawyers and accountants sometimes pushed me into despair. But all I had to do was take out my box of paints and my pad of paper. Painting became a way of healing. It was as though God were working in me, making me whole again, showing me the blessings of life.

During those days I often thought of that last conversation I had with my father. We’d talked about the afterlife and I told my dad, almost half-joking, that if he could, he should give me a sign from the beyond. Was this healing my sign?

But no, it came to me through my work. I’d told my agent to find anything he could for me. Finally I was offered two possible jobs. One was for a TV sitcom—the job that seemed most likely to develop into something viable. The other was a made-for-TV movie called Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman [2].

From what everyone said, this Dr. Quinn movie would go nowhere. No chance it would ever become a series. It was a Western and nobody watched Westerns anymore.

Moreover, it was about a woman doctor and a family. A doctor? Well, I knew I had to play that part. Everything I’d learned from my father, all those weekends spent at the hospital, all that time hearing him talk about patients and the history of medicine, convinced me to take on the role.

I did, and as many of you know, that made-for-TV movie that was going nowhere turned into a successful long-running series that played in 98 countries. I loved playing Dr. Quinn. I was my father’s daughter all the way, passionate about medicine, making sure every detail of the show was accurate. If ever I had a sign, this was it.

Today my life is happier than it’s ever been. I’ve remarried and have two more children. My prayer for them is that I can be the kind of teacher my parents were for me. That I can take all I’ve been taught by so many and pass it on. I want them to be generous, welcoming and trusting. To take joy in the moment and to listen to their inner voices. To understand that it’s not what happens to you in life that makes the difference, but it’s how you respond to the challenges that inevitably come along, and that there is a strength greater than our own in times of need.

Let me go back to that painting and what it was telling me—what I’ve known all along: The open heart doesn’t say, “No, I can’t do that.” It remains open to challenges, open to change, open to guidance. You can let go of what is upsetting and hurtful and allow something beautiful to enter. If your heart is open, it can never stay broken for long.