Jane Seymour

Jane Seymour is in her element — she’s got on an acorn-colored suede duster, and she’s standing on a dirt street in the center of what’s supposed to be Colorado Springs, Colorado, circa 1871. Large, thick leaves are falling from the oak trees, strewing gold and green onto the lanes of this mountain hamlet as autumn gives way to winter, and Seymour is playing the character that's made her a Saturday night heroine ... Dr. Michaela Quinn. Guest star Johnny Cash — returning to Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman for his fourth reprisal of retired gunslinger Kid Cole — is bidding Michaela goodbye right now.

“I want to thank you for talking sense to me, Dr. Mike,” says The Man In Black, who is indeed duded up in a long black duster and black cowboy hat that befit his off-screen legend.

“I didn’t say anything you hadn’t already said to yourself,” replies Seymour.

Behind Cash, there’s a stagecoach with four chestnut horses harnessed up and ready for action. They’re not going anywhere just yet, however. “They’re good picture horses,” whispers the wrangler. “Sometimes, they’ve got to stand on their marks for hours.”

With a final look at Seymour, Cash tells her, “Goodbye don’t necessarily have to be goodbye. You never know what tomorrow’s gonna bring,” then he steps up into the coach that will take him out of town. He seems reluctant to leave.

And who wouldn’t be? This Western period drama about a community of pioneering townsfolk that band together to help each other through adversity has been winning its time slot on Saturday nights for five years now; it’s established a “family night” franchise for CBS, and brought its star back from a wrenching divorce, giving her the “best period of her life” and the longest-lasting role of a career that has seen her play diverse roles that included a Bond girl, a duchess, and a concentration camp survivor. Nicknamed The Queen of the Miniseries for her roles in such projects as Captains and the Kings, War and Remembrance, and East of Eden, Seymour, now 45, has finally found the life she always wanted.

Married a fourth time, to sometimes Dr. Quinn director, James Keach, she has moved from Montecito to a Malibu beach home that’s a 15-minute drive from the Dr. Quinn set. “I’ll be doing this for a while,” she says, “because it really works in my life. I can actually raise my children and work with some great people.”

Seymour has been described as “steel-willed” (People), “glamorous, creative and sexy” (TV Guide), and “ultrafeminine” (InStyle). What she seems at this juncture of her life is impressively efficient, cramming her days so that minutes count. She observes, “When the iron is hot, you’ve got to go with it,” and adds, “I cannot conceive what boredom would feel like.” Not that she doesn’t get gloomy at times — “Oh yes,” she says, “I can get down about things. I don’t stay in that place very long though, because I tend to have a good weep and it comes right to the surface. I express it. So yes, I’ll become very upset about something but I don’t hang on to it forever.”

She’s as pragmatic as she is gorgeous: she wears her hair long, she says, so she needn’t fuss with haircuts, and her only off-camera make-up is some mascara. She considers herself “an optimist, but I’m very much a realist, too. I do tend to ‘go for it,’ and if things don’t work out, I usually acknowledge and accept that there’s some reason for it and that something even better will come out of it. And it always does.”

During a break in shooting, she takes a seat on the curb of a wood-plank street and points out the similarities she shares with her character, a frontier doctor: “I do come from the East, although a bit farther east — England. As far as those early days were concerned, though, leaving Boston for the Wild West would probably be the equivalent of going from England to California. Like Michaela, I’m from an all-girl family, and my father was a surgeon who showed me surgery and had me working in hospitals.”

And the differences? “Well, I am not a doctor. I’m not clever enough to be a real doctor, I just play one on TV. And I aspire to Dr. Quinn’s patience,” Seymour adds playfully.

Jane Seymour, a.k.a. Joyce Frankenberg (she changed her name at 17), grew up on the outskirts of London, where her mother was a nurse. Against her parents’ advice, she chose a career in dance, performing with the London Festival Ballet at age 17. A dance injury shortly thereafter sidelined her. "So I tried out as an actress and I did very well very quickly.”

Her movie debut was as a chorus girl in Richard Attenborough's Oh! What A Lovely War, which led to her first marriage, to the director’s son, Michael Attenborough. A second marriage, to Geoffrey Planer, was brief, then came a 10-year union with business manager David Flynn, with whom she had two children, and a divorce that spilled forth into the media with reports of her paying him $10,000 a month in alimony.

She met James Keach (the brother of actor Stacy Keach, whom he appeared alongside in The Long Riders) not long afterwards while working with him on a cable movie, Sunstroke (she starred, he directed).

“What surprised me was how vulnerable, at the time, she was,” recalls Keach, a laid-back guy who used to live in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, and considers himself “much more cowboy than Malibu boy.” “She was coming out of a situation that was very painful to her. I think that because of her celebrity and her status, she felt very isolated in some ways,” he says.

“Men think you’ve got to conquer a woman that’s this beautiful, or, you’ve got to be an arm piece,” suggests Keach. “They don’t want her to be an actress, and they get intimidated that she makes a lot of money and she’s a star and everyone wants her autograph. So she felt isolated because most guys couldn’t deal with that. And I don’t even care about that stuff. She knows that.”

Says Seymour, “He’s my best friend. We work together, we create together. And you know, some people have marriages where they go off and do a sport away from their husband or their wife, or they go to work to get away, sort of. We’re quite the opposite. Our idea of a good time is to work together, to play golf or paint or do any of our other interests. We’ve been the other route before. We’ve both been with partners where everyone went their separate ways and eventually ended up on their separate ways.”

Today, on the set, Seymour leans against Keach as they watch the video playback from his director’s chair, and he includes her in his thought process as to what the next shot will be. During another scene, she teases him about the "bits and bytes" in a prop book that’s meant to be a medical textbook. When she leaves for a costume change, he reflects, “She’s very nurturing and very loving, a great mother. Really smart, really independent.”

Seymour replies, "He probably thinks I do too much. I know he thinks I’m a great actress, very professional, and a great mother. And — a pretty good wife. I think his only gripe with me is that right now I’m being pulled in so many directions.”

Consider: her work day begins with a 4:15 a.m. wake-up call. She’s at the Paramount Ranch in Agoura Hills by 5:15, spends an hour in hair and makeup and wardrobe, then heads into rehearsal and shooting. She frequently delivers up to nine pages of dialogue a day, spending as many as 13 hours on set. Most of her horseback riding scenes are done without a stunt double. On the episode where she won a horse race, she says, “They got a stunt girl in as well, but I did exactly what she did and they used my stuff.” On the show, she handles two mounts — “I have Flash, and I have Billy. Billy, I drive mostly, but I also ride him,” she says. “You can tell it’s me when I’m riding because I’m always so excited that I’m smiling and you can see my teeth.”

During the day, there are costume and hair changes and visits with her kids who number six in all — Katie, Sean and the one-year-old twins, John and Kristopher, that she took fertility drugs to have, plus two step-kids, Kalen and Jennifer. Then there are photo sessions, interviews, charity work (UNICEF, Child Hope U.S.A., City Heart), and an occasional foray into Malibu for a parent-teacher conference.

“When I get off, I’m pretty beat,” she says. “I go home and, if possible, play with my babies, check my kids’ homework and talk to them about their day, have dinner with them like Michaela Quinn does, sitting around the dining room table. And then I usually crash with my pages for the next day.” By 9:00, she’s asleep.

Come weekends, Seymour attends her kids’ sporting events, watches movies, and recently squeezed in a Willie Nelson concert. Sundays are the best: “if my friends come over, that’s the day they come. That’s the only day I have to pamper myself. If I want to use a special scrub or put a special treatment on my hair or face, it’s my day to do that. And that’s the day I probably play golf or paint.”

One of those who has been invited over is costar William Shockley (bar owner Hank), who finds, “She’s a blast, totally fun, you know, really ‘of the moment.’ We play golf, hang out. She’s a regular cool person.”

Another who visits is Johnny Cash, whose appearances on Dr. Quinn with his wife, June Carter Cash, have led to a close friendship (she and Keach named one of the twins after him): “We got to know her through the show,” says Cash, “and found that, what you see on the screen is just what you get with Jane Seymour. She’s the same everywhere.”

From the May 1997 issue.