My Fantasy Girlfriend - Jane Seymour

Luckily, I now have HBO Movies to keep me company through the dreary and impoverished months of winter. Well, I say "luckily", but it's something of a mixed bag. For every classic like Dangerous Liaisons, there are two or three appalling straight-to-video comedies. However, for December, they're doing a complete run of of the Bond films (well, excluding Connery's Never Say Never Again and the recent Daniel Craig reinvention, I think), which is nicely nostalgic of a 1970s UK childhood - where a Bond film was always a staple of Christmas afternoon.

For me, the series peaked with You Only Live Twice, which HBO screened a couple of days ago (best villain's hideout, inside the volcano; and best villains - the People's Republic of China hiring Blofeld to engineer a war between America and the Soviet Union!). The action sequences got better and more elaborate during the 1970s, but the increasing reliance on improbable gadgets and big special effects took the stories to a comic-book level of unreality that started to become more risible than genuinely exciting. And I never warmed to Roger Moore's Bond - too smug and effete for a stone killer.

However, I liked Moore's first outing in Live And Let Die (on HBO tomorrow - but alas, I have other plans for Sunday night). I suspect it was partly that this was the last one I was able to enjoy with the naive innocence of childhood; once I hit my 'tween' years, my cynicism developed apace - and I outgrew Bond. Undoubtedly, it was also very largely down to the speedboat chase through the swamps (I forget now, is that Louisiana or Florida?) - possibly the best chase sequence in any of the Bond films, certainly much the best up to that point. But mostly, I think, it was down to Solitaire, the foxy voodoo priestess with a gift for reading tarot cards, played by the lovely English actress Jane Seymour.

Not, perhaps, the sexiest of the Bond girls, but surely the prettiest: a prime exemplar of the 'English Rose' type, of which Kate Beckinsale - already honoured in this series - is a more contemporary embodiment. Jane, I think, has an even deeper place in my heart than Kate; not only because she dawned upon my consciousness when I was still a young boy rather than an adult, but also because of that amazing, lustrous long hair of hers - almost down to her waist in many of those early and mid-70s roles from which I most fondly remember her.

Jane always seems to be mentioned at or near the top of lists of favourite Bond girls; and she is one of the few to be honoured with her own Barbie doll....

[Hmm, Christmas present wish-list?? Actually, although I wasn't such a fan of her as a Bond girl, I have to say the Pussy Galore one is particularly stylish, and a good likeness of Honor Blackman.]

However, I recall (perhaps inaccurately) being more miffed than aroused by Jane's appearance in the role. I'd feared it would spell the end of her career (in later years, the Bond producers would shift towards hiring more established actresses as their principal crumpet, but up to then it had been up-and-comers, mostly known only through TV or modelling; and most of them had failed to shake off the burden of becoming known primarily or solely as a Bond girl, and had subsequently vanished without trace - at least as far as a significant film career was concerned). And it did entail her premature departure from The Onedin Line, a wonderful, long-running BBC1 potboiler about merchant sailing ships in the Victorian era, which was a Sunday night viewing highlight throughout my schooldays. Jane had played Emma Callon, the beautiful young niece of a ruthless rival shipping magnate. It was as a result of her appearances as this character in the first couple of seasons of the show - when I was only about 6 or 7 years old - that I first became smitten with Jane Seymour. [I think this might be a picture of her in that part, the only one I could find. But it might also be from Somewhere In Time, the time-travelling romantic drama she made with Christopher Reeve in 1980.]

Jane continued to work on British TV and in small British films for a few years, but then... well, she was lost to us not through the 'curse of James Bond' but through American TV's growing obsession with the mini-series. After she relocated to Hollywood in the late '70s, I didn't see much more of her: I suppose she's now best-known for her '90s TV series Dr Quinn, Medicine Woman - in which she apparently managed to make 19th century frontier life seem sexy - but I've never seen a single minute of that. She's never had much of a career in mainstream cinema, but must have set some kind of record for the number of made-for-TV movies she's been in.

Like Jan Francis, another favourite actress of mine from my childhood, Jane had trained as a dancer. I mentioned in that post on Ms Francis how I've always been especially attracted to dancers for their poise and grace and air of self-confidence. I was therefore pleased to recognise Jane a few years ago (from the most fleeting of glimpses) in Richard Attenborough's Oh! What A Lovely War - her first, uncredited screen appearance, when she was still in her teens, and possibly the only time she's been asked to utilise her dancing skills on film. She's one of the chorus girls (but you'll have to be very sharp to spot her) in this music hall recruiting scene wherein Maggie Smith belts out a saucy I'll Make A Man Of Any One Of You.

In her busy and diverse - if not exactly stellar - career, Jane has also played the Biblical Bathsheba, Wallis Simpson (most improbable piece of casting ever?!) a bride of Frankenstein, Winston Churchill's first girlfriend, and an Arabian princess (in Sinbad and The Eye of The Tiger, in which she memorably played chess against a Ray Harryhausen-animated baboon).

And she's still looking stunning at the age of 60 (maybe the baboon had to sacrifice his pituitary gland to her for losing the chess match?).

I have learned during my online meanderings this morning that Ms Seymour's real name is the much less stage-friendly Joyce Penelope Wilhelmina Frankenberg. She took her professional name from the ill-fated third wife of Henry VIII - little anticipating what difficulties this would cause for people attempting to research her personal history in the age of Google.

Another unexpected tidbit of trivia I turned up is that her eyes are of different colours (heterochromia iridum, as the doctors term it). Now, I've never been fortunate enough to gaze into Ms Seymour's eyes for real. But you would think, wouldn't you, that I might have noticed this after so many years of admiring pictures of her? I take this as further evidence of the notorious male inability to notice or remember anyone's eye colour. (I've always had to make a conscious effort to memorise the colour of a girlfriend's eyes. And it is a fact which has always rapidly dislodged itself again from my brain after parting with one of them.)

And now, gentlemen, carry on swooning.