“I just realized I’ve been doing this for 61 years,” said Jane Seymour, 74, as she took the stage at the Filming Italy Sardegna Festival on Thursday to receive a career achievement award.
“I grew up with flat feet and a speech impediment, with my parents being told I had to have remedial classes for both,” the actor and producer, known for her roles in the James Bond movie “Live and Let Die” and the TV series “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman,” said. She then told the audience: “Don’t let anyone tell you you can’t do it!”
Earlier in the day, during a wide-ranging masterclass at the event on the island of Sardinia, Seymour described the course of her career in a similar vein.
“I started out, of course, playing ingenues and romantic heroines,” she said. “Then when they realized I could cry, I played victims. And then, when they realized I could be evil, I got to play the killers. That was fun,” she said, citing the TV series “East of Eden,” in which she plays the dark and manipulative Cathy Ames. “And then, you know, mamas, grandmothers. Then comedy, which is pretty much where I am now.”
“Basically, I’ve always broken the glass ceiling,” Seymour noted. For example, early in her career she was told by agents that “you can only be either a theater actor, or a television actor, or a movie actor.”
“Well, I remember one week opening on Broadway in ‘Amadeus,’” she recounted. “And then in the same week ‘East of Eden’ came out.” The same week also saw the release of the film “Summer in Time” with Christopher Reeves. “So I broke that [ceiling] in one week,” she said.
At present, Seymour is enjoying the success of Irish mystery series “Harry Wild,” which was recently renewed for a fifth season by AMC Network’s Acorn TV.
“Nobody gets a series of their own at 70. Nobody,” Seymour proudly pointed out. She also underlined that “Harry Wild” – on which Seymour plays a retired English literature professor who becomes a sleuth – “is very comedic, it’s very intelligent — and I’m also a producer.”
