After ‘Crashers,’ will we get to see even more of Seymour?
What’s a nice girl like Jane Seymour doing in a bawdy comedy such as “Wedding Crashers,” playing a sexually rapacious middle-aged mom?
Having a blast, it turns out. Not to mention torpedoing some preconceived notions people may have about an actress best known for playing a frontier doctor on the family-friendly CBS series “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman.”
“Wedding Crashers” stars Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn as two arrested adolescents who show up at weddings uninvited, dedicated to bedding as many beautiful women as possible.
At one wedding, Wilson’s character attracts the unwanted attention of the bride’s randy mother, played by Seymour.
“I read the script and thought it was hysterical,” says Seymour, 54. “It was a great character, and I knew that no one would ever think of me in a million years as being right for this part.”
Neither did they ever think “topless” – until a series of newspaper articles, mostly in the United Kingdom, announced breathlessly that the British-born Seymour would be exposing herself in “Crashers.”
The scene in question, in which she doffs her top in front of a reluctant Wilson, reveals little more than would be shown in a network television comedy. But Seymour says it was liberating.
“In terms of being able to just stand there in front of people without my clothes on, that was definitely interesting to start doing at my age,” she says. “But, you know, I feel that now I’m capable of playing pretty much anything.”
Seymour first attracted widespread attention in 1973 as Bond girl Solitaire in “Live and Let Die.” She played opposite Tom Selleck‘s jewel thief in “Lassiter” and Christopher Reeve‘s time-traveling romancer in “Somewhere in Time.”
For years, she was a mainstay of made-for-TV movies and miniseries – “Captains and the Kings,” “East of Eden,” “The Haunting Passion,” “War and Remembrance,” “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” She won an Emmy for her supporting role in 1988’s “Onassis: The Richest Man in the World.”
She then found new fans with “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman.” The series ran on CBS from 1993 to 1998, followed by a pair of TV movies.
Seymour has been keeping a lower profile since then, partly to devote more time to her family.
But if “Wedding Crashers” opens the door to more filmic pursuits, she says she’s ready to embrace the possibilities.
“Since I’ve done (this movie), a lot of people are looking at me quite differently, as if they’ve just discovered me,” she says, “including the producer and director of the movie, who had never seen my work other than the James Bond film I did when I was 20.
“What they think I was doing for the last 34 years, I don’t know.”
The birthday bunch
Actress Alice Ghostley is 79. Singer David Crosby is 64. Actor-comedian Steve Martin is 60. Actress Susan St. James is 59. Cartoonist Gary Larson (“The Far Side”) is 55. Actress Jackee Harry (“Sister, Sister,” “227”) is 49. Actress Marcia Gay Harden is 46. Singer Sarah Brightman is 44. Actress Susan Olsen (“The Brady Bunch”) is 44. Actress Halle Berry is 39. Actress Catherine Bell is 37. Actress Mila Kunis (“That ‘70s Show”) is 22.