Jane Seymour

Jane Seymour is an English-American actress whose six-decade career has produced multiple defining English-and-American film and TV roles — particularly her 1973 lead role as Solitaire in Guy Hamilton's James Bond film Live and Let Die, and her 1993–1998 lead role as Dr. Michaela "Mike" Quinn on CBS's western-medical-drama TV series Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. She was born Joyce Penelope Wilhelmina Frankenberg on February 15, 1951, in Hayes, Middlesex, England (now part of the London Borough of Hillingdon). Her Polish-Jewish father John Benjamin Frankenberg was an obstetrician-and-gynecologist who had emigrated from Łódź, Poland in 1947, and her Dutch mother Mieke Frankenberg was a homemaker who had survived three years in the Japanese internment camps in Indonesia across World War II.

Her education at the Arts Educational Schools London (1962–1968; without earning a degree) launched her early-career path. Her 1968 first feature-film appearance — at age 17 — in Richard Attenborough's Oh! What a Lovely War launched her early-career English film public profile.

Her 1973 lead role as Bond girl Solitaire (the Tarot-card-reading lover of villain Dr. Kananga) in Guy Hamilton's Live and Let Die — opposite Roger Moore's first James Bond film as the new James Bond — launched her late-1970s and 1980s American TV public profile. Her stage name Jane Seymour was adopted around the 1968 family-name change to a less Anglo-Polish identifier — derived from the historical Jane Seymour (the third wife of King Henry VIII).

Her January 1, 1993 first-broadcast appearance as Dr. Michaela Quinn on CBS's Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman launched her 1990s American TV-medical-drama public profile. The series ran for 150 episodes across six seasons (1993–1998) and produced her 1996 Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a TV Drama Series. She was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2000. She has been married four times — to Michael Attenborough (1971–1973), Geoffrey Planer (1977–1978), David Flynn (1981–1992), and James Keach (1993–2015).

Her name Jane derives from the medieval English form of Joan (from the Hebrew Yochanan meaning "God is gracious"). Jane has been continuously among the most-popular American girls' names since 1880.