SHE HAS one brown eye and one green eye, she appeared, uniquely, three times half nude in Playboy. She was a Bond girl in Live and let die, married and divorced four times, won an Emmy, two Golden Globes and a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame, and took the name of the only Henry VIII wife who received a state funeral and a grave next to him in Windsor.
Jane Seymour.
Born in London as Joyce Penelope Wilhelmina Frankenberg. The surname is Polish Jewish. Wilhelmina is Dutch. Grandma’s name was Wilhelmina de Bondt, from Dordrecht, she married Anton van Tricht from the Dutch town of Steenderen and gave birth to Jane’s mother in Deventer. Mieke van Tricht. She raised Jane with Dutch values and with lots of nasi goreng.
It was one of those situations where World War II radically altered people’s life paths. Dad Frankenberg lost many family members in the holocaust, mom Van Tricht spent three years in a Japanese concentration camp. He was a gynaecologist, she a nurse, London was where they ended up meeting. “I grew up steeped in Dutch culture,” Jane said later when, fittingly, she played a doctor in Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman’s 150 episodes. “And even if 20 people showed up at our house, there was nasi goreng.”
SHE DIDN’T care for Frankenberg when she wanted to be an actress, so the name went overboard. Jane Seymour had a sweet dramatic ring to it, newly married to Henry, newly queen, newly mom, and two weeks after giving birth she died of complications. It worked. Joyce’s new name caught on as soon as she made her splash into the Hollywood pond.
She played in Amadeus, not the film but a thousand times on Broadway, became friends with Christopher Reeves and Johnny Cash, whose names she gave to her twin sons, became a fake bride to Freddie Mercury, and did an incredibly large number of films and TV series – with the end not yet in sight.
Plus those three times in Playboy, unequaled. The last time, in this picture six years ago, she was 67.
