Two-time Golden Globe Winner and iconic Hollywood starlet Jane Seymour is known throughout the world for playing a Bond girl, Maria Callas and Dr Quinn, Medicine Woman. But her latest role as Ruby in Ruby's Choice could be her most poignant yet.
Jane Seymour attends the 2022 Vanity Fair Oscar Party following the 94th Oscars at the The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills, California on March 27, 2022. Photo: AFP
Seymour plays Ruby, a woman with dementia, sharing a room with her granddaughter, who is less than keen about the arrangement. However, the more time they spend together and the more family secrets emerge, the more the teenage appreciates her grandmother.
Having been around a lot of people who have had Alzheimer's throughout her life, not to mention producing the movie about musician Glen Campbell's struggle with the disease, the 71-year-old actress felt instantly drawn to the role.
Seymour, who is a global ambassador for the Dementia Foundation for Spark of Life, joins Sunday Morning to discuss Ruby's Choice, how she got inside the head of the character, and why she continues to keep looking forward and living her life in the present moment.
"I'm very proud of this film," Seymour says.
"It's very much sort of the little engine that could. The fact that we were able to film it during Covid was unbelievable."
"Having been around a lot of people with Alzheimer's, having had it touch my life ... I just felt this was a very important movie."
Alzheimer's has been the subject of several films lately, including Sir Anthony Hopkins' Oscar-winning turn in The Father. Seymour says the somewhat optimistic tone of Ruby's Choice sets it apart a bit.
"There have been a bunch of movies about Alzheimer's but not ones like Ruby, where she really turns everything around for the better and makes life better for everyone out of something that normally just makes you want to weep and cry and you feel it's the end of the world."
Seymour said the movie strives to show multiple sides of how dementia affects families and shows Ruby's point of view.
"She's bringing another way of looking at the world while she's leaving our world in her own mind."
"It's curious and it's amusing at the same time it just rips your heart out."
Seymour was one of the executive producers of Glen Campbell: I'll Be Me, a 2014 documentary about the late country singer's battle with Alzheimer's.
She said that while working on that, Campbell could get confused and not know where he was, and she saw how music and art made a big difference in his moods.
"The last things to go are dance, music, singing and art.
"If you're ever with someone who's suffering from dementia or Alzheimer's, you can bring them back to life for a moment or so through music that they probably would have known back in the day when they were much younger."
Seymour also had an uncle who had Alzheimer's and an aunt who did not want to put him in a care home.
"The stress of it took her life about 15 or more years before her husband died," she says.
"I always tell people who are caregivers there comes a point where you can't care for someone if you can't care for yourself."
While playing Ruby, Seymour says she had to commit to imagining the way the world looked to her.
"Playing Ruby I just had to imagine that everything was real for her, whether the people around her knew it wasn't or not. For her, it was."
Seymour said she had her own near-death experience some years ago due to anaphylactic shock, and it changed her own perspectives.
"I realised you only take two things with you when you pass - and that is the love you've shared, and the difference you've made."
