Open Heart

By Jane Seymour, Los Angeles, California

As appeared in

One morning I was painting, and found myself drawing sketches of hearts, but instead of cheering me, they made me sad.

The heart shape seemed too closed. It suggested people cut off from one other, as if to protect themselves from pain. I began to sketch more, and the heart shapes changed. They became more open.

Open hearts, I thought. That seemed right. Because of all the things I’ve done in my life—in my acting career, in my relationships with others—learning to live with an open heart has been crucial. Fortunately, I’ve been blessed with good teachers.

There was my mother, Mieke Frankenberg, one of the most generous, positive people on earth. I grew up in England, the oldest of three girls, and we never knew how many to expect for dinner.

Mummy was always welcoming someone who needed a good meal or a place to stay. “F.H.B” was a standard code in our house: “Family Hold Back.” She was fantastic at making a dinner stretch—it was the whole loaves and fishes parable.

“Things always work out for the best,” she told me and my sisters. Her optimism rubbed off.

Yet she’d endured tremendous hardship when she was young. Born in Holland, she was living in Indonesia at the outbreak of World War II. When the Japanese invaded, she was put in a concentration camp for women and children. The conditions were brutal and food was scarce.

Mummy worked as a nurse solely on the basis of her training as a Red Cross volunteer. She was expected to care for the sickest prisoners and the dying. It must’ve been excruciating work. I know it was heartbreaking.

War ended and she made her way to England, determined not to become embittered by her experience. “As long as you can help someone else,” she explained to us, “you can survive.” She wanted us to know that living with an open heart was a choice, not a consequence of the circumstances you faced.

My father, John Frankenberg, was a doctor, one of the first infertility specialists. He was devoted to his work and his patients. Most weekends he had to be on call at the hospital, which was far from our home in Wimbledon. He didn’t want to be separated from his children, so he made us three girls auxiliary nurses and we joined him at the hospital.

We had our own little uniforms and were assigned rudimentary chores like making cotton balls from huge rolls of cotton or cutting gauze into swabs. We sewed tabs on the back of surgical gowns for the doctors and nurses or, if we were lucky, helped take care of the preemie babies.

Everything about my father’s work fascinated me. He taught us how the body worked and he showed us what happened in an operating room. He didn’t want us to be afraid of blood, and we weren’t. We saw firsthand what commitment and care it took to be a good doctor. If I were better at math, I might have become a doctor myself.

Instead, I became an actress and I did my best to put my parents’ values of hard work and passion in everything I did. I was fortunate to have success early. I moved to California and made some wonderful films (working with Christopher Reeve in Somewhere in Time was a milestone) and made-for-TV movies.