NEW YORK — Jane Seymour started her first business at the age of 15. The actress, producer, painter, author and entrepreneur — to name a few hats that Seymour, now 65, has juggled since — was then a budding dancer, studying ballet on a partial scholarship. Needing money for pointe shoes, she spotted an opportunity.
"At the time, women were burning their bras and proudly showing what was underneath, in see-through blouses," Seymour recalls. "I wasn't ready for that. But in England they have these birds called blue tits and great tits, so I embroidered the birds," strategically placed, on a blouse. "It made it to the newspaper, for some reason," and the teenager found herself designing more such items, for a noted London store.
Half a century later, Seymour's creative talents and business acumen are channeled into a range of projects, from Jane Seymour Designs — a lifestyle brand that includes furniture (in collaboration with designer Michael Amini),
home accessories and botanicals — to ventures in beauty products and fine art.
In 2010, she launched the Open Hearts Foundation, a charity inspired by her late mother, a Dutch native who was imprisoned in a Japanese internment camp before meeting Seymour's British father.
"I would ask her how she survived," says Seymour, who arrives early and bright-eyed for a morning interview, glamorous in a fitted red dress. "She'd say, 'Darling, there was always someone worse off than me.' " After her mother died in 2007, Seymour had a necklace made with a pair of connected heart symbols, "just to remember her." A representative from Kay Jewelers noticed it, and Seymour wound up designing a jewelry line.
The foundation acknowledges others who "have taken adversity and turned it into an opportunity to help others," Seymour says. A new initiative, the Celebrating Open Hearts Contest, was introduced this year, inviting participants to vote for organizations that represent this ideal. Four finalists have been selected, and the public can vote for a winner at the site between April 7 and April 27.
On that last day, Seymour will begin performances in a new British Theatre Playhouse revival of Noel Coward's The Vortex, in Singapore. "I'm terrified," she says of the stage production, her first in more than three decades; but she's also excited to play the character, the mother of a grown son and a woman suffering from, as Seymour describes it, "sexual vanity."
The mother of six adults herself (including step-children with ex-husbands James Keach and David Flynn), and grandmother of six, Seymour has been heartened in recent years to play "women of my own age," in roles ranging from the mother of Marlon Wayans' character in the parody 50 Shades of Black to the longtime wife of a terminally ill man in last year's acclaimed Bereave, for which she also served as an executive producer.
"I do a lot of independent movies now that are beautifully written, with fantastic stories," notes the former Bond girl and star of the '90s TV staple Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, who more recently has popped up on the CW series Jane The Virgin.
"People ask why I do so much," Seymour muses. "It's very simple. I don't care about being paid; I love what I do. I love acting, love producing, love writing books, love color and texture and style. You couldn't pay me to be a woman who lunches, or just goes shopping. I have zero interest in that."
