When Jane Seymour starred in the 1973 Bond film Live And Let Die, few could have imagined that five decades later at the age of 75 she’d be playing a kind of Jane Bond herself. For as the film’s tarot card-reading virgin Solitaire, her role, shall we say, was hardly meaty. She spent much of the time running around looking terrified, and having been tricked into bed by Roger Moore’s Bond with a rigged deck of cards she loses her tarot-reading abilities once she’s been deflowered by the libidinous 007.But it’s amazing what 53 years and a bit of sexual equality can do. For as the titular character in her latest series Harry Wild, not only does she solve murders, she seduces lovers at a rate even Bond would applaud. ‘Harry has found a whole new chapter of her life that includes a new skillset in being a detective,’ says Jane, ‘and the freedom to choose whoever she wants to be involved with. People keep telling me they love the character and I do too.’Now in its fifth season, the series has been a huge success thanks largely to Jane’s spirited performance as Harriet ‘Harry’ Wild – a retired English literature professor turned amateur sleuth who teams up with student Fergus (Rohan Nedd) to solve an array of quirky crimes in Dublin. As well as some of the more outlandish scenarios (in one episode, a victim’s head is served on a platter), its appeal to viewers, says Jane, is that while ‘a lot of women of a certain age kind of give up, Harry certainly isn’t one of them. People tell me, “We aren’t Harry Wild, but it’s fun to imagine.”’For those who haven’t given up, one need look no further than Jane herself. As she speaks from her home in Malibu, she is glowing – the reason for which becomes clear later on. Resplendent in red and the same size 8 as in her Bond days, she insists she hasn’t subjected herself to the typical Hollywood regime of fat jabs and injectables – opting instead to eat healthily, exercise sensibly and most of all, shun Botox. ‘I tried it a long time ago, but I need all the muscles to be working so there’s no point,’ she says. ‘I’m not against anybody doing it, but I personally have chosen to try to age as gracefully as I can. I still look like me – just with more smile lines. I think of my body as basically a vehicle – I take care of it and hopefully it runs for as long as it can.’ Jane Seymour says she’s always been a ‘glass-half-full person’ and recently announced she’s getting married for the fifth time Jane herself grew up plain Joyce Frankenberg in a semi in south London’s Merton Park, the eldest of three sistersYet there have been occasions when Jane’s body has almost failed her. ‘I’ve had three near-death experiences,’ she says, ‘and one where I actually died and was resuscitated.’ It occurred in 1988 when she was filming Onassis: The Richest Man In The World in Spain. Having contracted bronchitis, she went into anaphylactic shock after the antibiotics intended to cure her were injected into a vein rather than the muscle. She saw ‘a white light and I looked down at everyone trying to resuscitate me’. It’s entirely in keeping with her pick-yourself-up-and-dust-yourself-down attitude, though, that when she finally recovered she went on to win an Emmy for her performance as Onassis’s lover Maria Callas.A decade later she was filming The New Swiss Family Robinson in Puerto Rico. ‘I got an infection but they weren’t sure whether I had dengue fever,’ she says. ‘Mercifully, it ended up being something else called leptospirosis [a bacterial infection], so that was curable with a lot of antibiotics and rest. And then the other time was when I had the babies.’Jane was 44 and pregnant with twins John and Kristopher when she developed pre-eclampsia. ‘I needed an emergency C-section and what was bizarre was that the real queen Jane Seymour died from the same sort of thing.’ All three experiences, she says, ‘changed my outlook on life 100 per cent. I’d say that I am who I am today because of them.’She says she’s always been a ‘glass-half-full person’ and she’s not kidding; Jane recently announced she’s getting married for the fifth time. She’s been seeing musician and doctor John Zambetti, 77, for almost three years and he decided to get down on one knee to propose to Jane at her Malibu home. But the ring popped out of the box and as John fumbled for it under the bed his knee got stuck. They laughed hysterically. And to make matters worse, ‘we weren’t wearing any clothes’.It was their children who had introduced them to each other at a gig. ‘It’s so wild,’ says Jane, ‘because his son was very close with my son Sean as children, so my kids were hanging out at his house and his kids were hanging out here, but we never met.’Once they did, decades later, however, there was an immediate spark. ‘We’ve been living together the whole time since, and my family say they’ve never seen me happier. The beauty of being in a relationship at this time in our lives is that independently we’ve had such rich lives and been through a lot. Now, this is our time.’Certainly, no one can fault her marital optimism. She was 20 when she got hitched for the first time to Michael Attenborough, son of actor-director Richard, though the marriage ended after two years. Geoffrey Planer, the older brother of The Young Ones star Nigel and director of medical firm Planer, came next but only lasted a year. Jane has been seeing musician and doctor John Zambetti, 77, for almost three years and the couple got engaged at her Malibu home Jane insists she hasn’t subjected herself to the typical Hollywood regime of fat jabs and injectables – opting instead to eat healthily, exercise sensibly and most of all, shun Botox It was then followed by marriages to two Americans – businessman David Flynn (which produced two children, Katherine, 44, and Sean, 40) and filmmaker James Keach (the father of John and Kristopher, 30). She has said in the past that all four men left her for other women, though, she adds, ‘I’m very friendly with all my exes, even if apparently it’s very unusual.’She has just finished writing her memoir, which is due out next year. ‘I talked to them about it beforehand. It was fun to find out what was really going on with my marriages and now I think, “Really? That was why?” We all laugh about it now.’ How on earth did she manage to stay friends with them when they did the dirty on her? ‘Well, you’ll have to read the book!’ she laughs, adding that one of the reasons is that she forgoes any bitterness.‘I live in the moment and I don’t hang onto the past.’It’s an attitude she learned from her parents – her doctor father Benjamin, whose relatives had been murdered during the Holocaust, and her mother Mieke, who had survived a Japanese internment camp. Jane herself grew up plain Joyce Frankenberg in a semi in south London’s Merton Park, the eldest of three sisters, and after her dreams of becoming a dancer were ended by an injury she turned to acting, making her film debut as an 18-year-old in the Richard Attenborough-directed Oh! What A Lovely War. Four years later she starred in Live And Let Die, yet despite the exposure the film brought her she didn’t always find it easy getting parts in Britain. ‘A lot of directors thought I could only play a sex symbol, which is weird because I was playing a virgin! The reason I moved to America is that I was told I didn’t look or sound like the English girl next door, but Americans accepted me as an American.’At one point when she was in the States, however, Jane had an encounter that could have ended her career. A producer, who had invited her to his home for a viewing of her latest screen test, told her, ‘I’ve told everyone you are the perfect person to play this role... now it’s your turn,’ putting his hand on her leg. She rebuffed his sexual advances and, furious, he threatened Jane that if she ever told anyone what happened she’d never work again. She was so shaken by the experience ‘that I gave up acting for a year after that,’ she says. ‘I came back to England, baked a lot of bread, did a lot of embroidery and lived happily like a housewife in Mortlake.’But after a while her boyfriend Geoffrey Planer wasn’t having any of it. ‘Geep, as I called him, knew nothing about acting but he called my agent and said, “Jane has to stop making bread. Is there something she can do?”’ That something was the lead role of Nora in a stage production of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. ‘I told Geep I didn’t think I could do it and he said, “Well, I’m not talking to you until you learn the first ten pages,”’ she laughs. ‘It not only got me back into acting, but I did some of the best work of my life.’ The couple subsequently married and Jane says ‘he’s a special man and probably one of my closest friends. He was the one who encouraged me to go to America, even though it was detrimental to our marriage.’It was the end of her third marriage to David Flynn in 1992, however, that was the most sobering. Though Jane had been working continuously on blockbuster series such as War And Remembrance with Robert Mitchum and the TV film The Woman He Loved (playing Wallis Simpson), David, her business manager as well as husband, lost all her money in failed investments, leaving her £6million in the red. ‘Financially and emotionally I was at the bottom of the barrel at that point,’ says Jane, whose agent rang round Hollywood, telling them she would do any project at all to pay off the mountainous debts. ‘The thing is though that whenever life turned almost immeasurably tough, for some reason a gift would arrive and Dr Quinn, Medicine Woman was a gift.’Intended as a movie of the week about a 19th-century female doctor who relocates to a small Wild West town, the networks had virtually given up on Dr Quinn before it began. ‘They told me it doesn’t work to have a woman in the lead of a drama,’ says Jane. ‘That Westerns don’t work, period pieces don’t work and neither do family values.’ Instead it went on to have a successful six-season run all over the world.She briefly dated her co-star, the lion-maned Joe Lando, and fans of Dr Quinn will be in for a treat watching the latest season of Harry Wild since Joe stars as a silver fox pathologist who has numerous sparky run-ins with Harry. ‘He’s hotter than ever,’ says Jane, ‘and there’s some serious chemistry between us in the show.’ It seems ridiculous to ask the boundlessly energetic Jane if she has any plans to retire and predictably, she bats the question away. ‘I don’t see any reason to because what am I retiring from?’ she asks. ‘Doing what I love?’ And with the work coming in – and a wedding to plan – life couldn’t be any sweeter. ‘I look outside my window, I see the ocean, dolphins and seabirds,’ she says, ‘and I’ve never been happier.’Harry Wild is on Acorn TV.