Jane Seymour was handed one part in 1973 and Britain decided she was that part. America was less fussy, and gave her two decades of period heroines and one long-running frontier doctor. We would still like to see what she does when nobody is holding a gun.
Fi1m perspective
In Live and Let Die (1973) Jane Seymour sits at a table of tarot cards, in a high collar and a great deal of embroidery, and tells a man's fortune with the composure of someone who has never been wrong. For the first stretch she is the most interesting person in Guy Hamilton's film, because she is the only one who knows something Bond does not. Then the script has him deal with her virginity, and with it her gift, and Seymour is left with nothing to play but fright. We felt sorry for her, which is not what a Bond film intends, and the pity was for the actress as much as for Solitaire: a woman who could see the future reduced to running behind a man in a safari suit.
That one part followed her home. She had come to it from ballet and from The Onedin Line (1972–73), and after it serious work in Britain dried up. Her own account is blunt: "The English could not get past the fact I had been a Bond girl." So she left. From the late 1970s the American television miniseries, a form Britain never took seriously, became her territory, with East of Eden (1981) as Steinbeck's Cathy Ames and a run of real women including Maria Callas. On film there was Somewhere in Time (1980), a romance in period dress. Then six seasons as Dr Michaela Quinn in Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman (1993–98), a doctor in a family Western that a great many people watched for a great many years.
The pattern is plain: a corset, a secret or a profession, and usually a man who underestimates her. We have not reviewed the miniseries and will not pretend to have weighed them. What we can say from the one film we have is that stillness is her strength, that she is better at listening than at reacting, and that a director who spends her on screaming has misread the instrument. Julie Harris dressed Solitaire beautifully and it did not help, because the costume was doing the work the script would not. The American parts at least put her in charge of a room.
She has done other things since that the Bond casting would not have predicted: Constanze in Amadeus on stage opposite Ian McKellen, the mother of the bride in Wedding Crashers (2005), and Harry Wild (2022–), in which she is still working into her seventies. Britain has had half a century to reconsider what it saw in 1973. It is not too late, but it is getting on.
Biography
Jane Seymour is an English actress. Born Joyce Penelope Wilhelmina Frankenberg on 15 February 1951 in Hayes, Middlesex, she adopted her stage name upon entering the profession. She began her career with a role in the British television series The Onedin Line (1972–1973) before gaining international attention as the psychic Solitaire in the James Bond film Live and Let Die (1973).
Seymour later starred as Dr Michaela Quinn in the American series Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman (1993–1998). She has appeared in films including Somewhere in Time (1980), East of Eden (1981) and Wedding Crashers (2005). She received an Emmy Award in 1988, two Golden Globe Awards, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2000.
