Jane Seymour says her career remains far from over, and the role she is most emotionally attached to is still the one that changed her. In the 1988 miniseries War and Remembrance, she played Natalie Henry in the massive World War II production, a project she says left her physically and mentally drained. Nearly 40 years later, she still remembers all nine months of filming, especially the cast and crew members connected to Holocaust memory and testimony.
Seymour says the production felt unusually authentic because its first assistant director, Branko Lustig, was a Holocaust survivor who had also worked on Schindler’s List. She recalls him recruiting survivors from synagogues and finding that many of the extras were rabbis, doctors, lawyers, and survivors who did not need direction. Her father was Jewish and lost family in the Holocaust, and she says the project helped her understand what it meant to be Jewish. Filming in Birkenau at 3 a.m., she says, became one of the most important moments of her father’s life.
Now 75, Seymour is promoting her memoir and remains busy with acting, writing, and philanthropy. She stars in Harry Wild, a five-season mystery series that only recently arrived in Israel on yes and airs on Acorn TV. She plays retired Dublin literature professor Harry Wild, who quits teaching, gets mugged, and ends up solving murders with the young man who robbed her. Seymour says she was drawn to the idea of an older woman who embraces age, romance, and second chances.
She also reflects on her early fame as a Bond girl in Live and Let Die, saying that in the 1970s, "women were hated" and that people called her a "sexy Bond girl" even though she played a virgin. Seymour says she did not think of herself as especially beautiful, but believes avoiding plastic surgery helped her remain versatile. She was married four times, is engaged to doctor-musician John Zambetti, and has six children and four grandchildren. She also recalls financial trouble after a difficult third divorce, which led her to take the TV movie that became Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, a global hit. Today, she says social media gives her more control, though TikTok briefly suspended her after treating her like a bot.
