Jane Seymour is booked and busy defying ageism in Hollywood at 73
By Lisa Respers France, CNN
(CNN) — Ask Jane Seymour about her longevity as an actress and she can point to several things, including her willingness to take on a variety of roles.
“I’m not afraid to play old,” she recently told CNN. “I’m really not afraid and honestly my agent told me that I was the only client almost he had that worked all the way through Covid.”
The septuagenarian star has Season 3 of her series “Harry Wild” premiering Monday, in which she plays retired literature professor Harriet “Harry” Wild who has turned detective to solve cases with the help of her sidekick, the much younger Fergus played by Rohan Nedd.
The show, which Seymour also executive produces, has humor as well as mystery and it’s a natural fit for the “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman” actor, who says many didn’t realize she could do comedy until her breakout role in the 2005 film “Wedding Crashers.”
“Everyone was shocked,” she said. “They couldn’t believe I could be funny and so I did a ton of comedy after that. And actually comedy, really good comedy in my opinion, is grounded.”
That’s one of the things that attracted Seymour to the role of Harry, because she “loved the idea of playing a very independent woman who doesn’t need to get married, does drink too much red wine and changes career paths in her seventies.”
It’s the same type of fearlessness Seymour displays in real life, and she believes the full life she lives helps make her a better performer.
“I have children, I have grandchildren, I do other things. I paint, I design, I do philanthropy,” she said. “I’ve never sort of sat by the phone hoping it would ring. I’m always creating something, or if somebody offers me something that’s wacky and a tiny little thing I’ll do it. There’s no too small a role.”
And there’s no role too emotional for Seymour either. She plays a grandmother with dementia in both the new film “Ruby’s Choice” and a forthcoming short film titled “And You Are?”
She knows about the disease having been good friends with singer Glen Campbell whose journey with Alzheimer’s was the focus of the CNN documentary “Glen Campbell I’ll Be Me,” a project she was passionate about that was directed by her now ex-husband James Keach.
These days Seymour has found love with her boyfriend John Zambetti, who is a doctor and a musician.
She chuckles when she recounts how she famously played a physician on “Dr. Quinn,” a role Zambetti wasn’t familiar with before they started dating, but now loves.
“When he met me and decided he wanted to go out with me, he barely remembered seeing [the James Bond film she starred in] ‘Live and Let Die’ and watched it again,” she said. “He’d never seen or heard of anything like ‘Dr. Quinn’ or anything and he’s a doctor, so you’d think he would’ve known. Now he says ‘Can we watch Dr. Quinn?’”
Season 3 of “Harry Wild” premieres Monday on AcornTV.
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