INDEX

ALL ABOUT JANE
Meet Jane
Jane's Filmography
Vital Statistics
Secrets to Staying Fit
Charities
Alternative Medicine
St. Catherine's Court
Meet James Keach
James' Filmography

ARTISTIC VENUES
Jane as Artist
Jane Seymour Handbags
Signature Collection
Household Collection
Children's Clothing

BOOKS
Making Yourself at Home
Remarkable Changes
Romantic Living
This One & That One
Two at a Time

MISCELLANEOUS
Voting Polls
Trivia
Tic Tac Toe
Rosie's Mom Squad

PHOTO ALBUM
Just Jane

GUIDE TO ROMANTIC LIVING

Chapter Two

Chapter One: The Romantic Attitude

I hope this is a book that will change your life. I'm going to tell you how to live life romantically, how to get the most out of every moment. I want you to realize, as I did, that you can be the person you wish to be. I want you to see your dream person and to become that person. Your dream person needn't remain a figment of your imagination. You can walk right into your dreams and come out a new person.

Of course, it's risky. Any kind of change is risky. But if you're going to get the most out of your life, you must grasp its pleasures along the way. You must be receptive.

I realize, now that I have children of my own, that I was taught this in childhood. Above the mantelpiece in my parent's house in England, there is still a picture of me and my two sisters: three girls dressed as ballerinas, wearing blue headbands, with our hair piled up into buns. Our faces are graceful, our necks long, our posture perfect. At the time of the portrait, we were in fact just three quite pretty girls of six, seven, and eight with normal plumpness. But the idealized portrait caught hold of my imagination. I wanted to be that person.

All my life I have done this -- seen an image in my mind and tried to create it, to bring it alive. Perhaps the image in your mind is of you and a hazily pictured lover walking on the beach. He stoops to kiss you as the waves crash in. My point is: make it happen. But don't make it happen with a dream lover -- turn your husband, your long-term boyfriend, or the man you've just started dating into that lover. Make a dream out of everyday reality, then make reality out of a dream. That's what my parents taught me to do.

My parents weren't rich, but they weren't poor, and everything they had was spent on living: breakfasts that went on and on all morning as guests from home or abroad came down to eat; Indonesian feasts for lunch which seldom started before three or four; dinners for unknown numbers at a moment's notice -- doctors, architects, people speaking different languages, people of all ages. This was life on a grand scale, but I assumed it was normal until I visited other people's more conventional homes. It wasn't extravagant; it was simply exhuberant. Our life was my mother's dream come true.

My father was very much the head of the household. It was his dreams for me that were the inspiration for my career and that still inspire me. He helped me to make every day of our lives a romantic adventure. I can see him now, sitting in his armchair with his glasses on, putting the finishing touches to the Christmas pantomime he had written for us three girls and our friends.

He didn't just write the pantomime, he filmed it with a movie camera. It is something that any father could have done, but how many actually make the effort? We still have the film, a little crackly; I play Cinderella. He introduced us to classical music by encouraging us to create ballets which we performed out on the lawn. One minute, I was little Joyce Frankenberg from Wimbledon, the next my sisters and I and our friends were dancing wildly over the lawn to the music of Vivaldi's The Four Seasons. What could be more romantic? My parents turned the house and garden into the Royal Ballet one day, a film studio the next.

My father created dreams for us everywhere, and they all caught my imagination, but the one that caught it most of all was that of becoming a ballerina. At the age of thirteen, I went to a professional ballet school, and if it hadn't been for a knee injury, I would still, I think, be an average ballerina today. Instead, I followed my next-best fantasy: to become an actress.

In many ways, I seem to live life out of a romantic novel. But of course the reality is much of the time anyone's reality, the ordinary problems. Sometimes, I'm so caught up in planning and juggling and worrying that I lose all sense of how lucky I am. And this is the point: romance doesn't come automatically to someone with long hair and a stately home. Romance is an attitude, a state of mind. Like all the best qualities, it comes from within: you just have to look for it and know how to develop it. It is this that I am going to share with you in the pages of this book. You can't sit back and accept life. You've got to seize it, as my parents taught me, whether it's waking up early one morning and going out for a walk at dawn or making your partner an unexpected breakfast in bed, complete with champagne. It's wearing silky underwear beneath an executive suit. It's swimming naked at night in a warm pool. It's realizing that life is there to be altered, to be made more interesting, to be lived the way you want and dare to live it.

Life is not a fairy tale -- even mine -- but at times, if I try hard enough, I believe I can turn it into one. In England, I often rode my horse in the early morning -- it's the dew, the air, the sounds of the birds, all the things that are available and free to anyone, that are romantic. It's making each day fresh -- noticing things. At our house in England, I send my daughter, Katie, out searching for leaves and flowers which we look at and label together. It helps make her appreciate the wonder and excitement of everything around her.

The world is a miraculous place, full of marvelous things. But you have to be able to see them. You have to look. Being alive is romantic so long as you don't get so weighed down by your work and responsibilities that you can no longer see how lucky you really are, how wonderful life can be. You have to try to be happy, of course. It doesn't happen by magic. I fail often -- I work too hard, I get weighed down by things, I lose my temper, my enthusiasm. But there's always tomorrow.

My life isn't exactly a textbook description of an old-fashioned life of fidelity and romance. I'm on my third marriage. I had two divorces by the time I was thirty. Not very good going.

In those days, I was obsessed with my career. I would give up anyone and anything to go off and do another movie. That was my childishness. It took me until my thirties to realize what it was that I really wanted and how important that was and how I could use my romantic nature to build on what I had rather than searching for what I hadn't. During my life, I have thrown myself into quite a few relationships that maybe I should have thought about more seriously beforehand. I was the ultimate romantic. Each one had to be special and extraordinary. But what I've learned now, and one reason why this book is so important to me, is that there is a way for all of us to live romantically without living foolishly, a way of combining hard work with romance.

Few people nowadays have much leisure time to devote to the beauty of life and to thinking about romance and how to keep their marriages or love affairs exciting. And look at the results: broken families, broken hearts, and broken lives. We concentrate on our careers, on running a home efficiently, on governing the country, and we look around and discover the thing needed most of all -- a happy and stable partnership -- has gone.

Romance is vital. We must bring it back into this century of office blocks and superwomen. Nowadays, we all have to juggle continually. There is never any time. But all the juggling will be pointless, a parade of a useless skill, if while parading that skill we forget to live. The precious moments, the grace and style and delight and tendernes, are all there, waiting to be found. But if you take things too seriously you'll never find them, and you'll regret the flowers you didn't buy, the walks you didn't take, the picnics you didn't plan.

Recently, in Portugal, my mother heard the birds singing at five in the morning. Instead of groaning, she woke up my father, and together they went down to the beach and sat hand in hand watching the sunrise. This is romance. Let us not treat life as an obstacle race, with a frown on our faces, something to get through. Instead, let's enjoy it, and give our children the background to enjoy it.

Let us not lose that most romantic of things: freedom. I don't mean we must all be vagabonds. It's the freedom of spirit that matters, and it is that that helps make a romantic partnership.

We live in a material age. We are always trying to improve our lot, but too often this means changing the circumstances of our lives. When the vacuum cleaner doesn't work, we get a new one. When our car isn't as smart as someone else's, we change it. But when we take this attitude into our personal lives, it's not so simple. If we're not completely happy with our husband, we decide our relationship with him is obsolete. We don't bother to mend old cars, so we don't see that oure relationship needs mending, needs freshness, needs romance. The answer is not to find a new lover, it is to turn your husband into the lover. The answer for a young unmarried girl is not to sit alone reading romantic novels, it is to go out and find your romantic hero, to turn that sky chap at the far end of the room into the man for you.

It's you who has to change, who has to make things happen for you. The pattern of the leaves is there for anyone. Of course it's romantic going to Paris, but it's also romantic to walk along any beach at midnight, hand in hand. More romantic, actually, because it's not pre-packaged romance. There's not that awful business of thinking, oh, this is expensive, we must enjoy it. Real romance is free, but it requires thought and love and a certain tenderness, and more than a little imagination.

It is hard to be open to change while under constant pressure. There does not appear to be time anymore to be happy. It is hard to fit it into the schedule. Work is important. We certainly don't want to lose what women have struggled for so many years to achieve. In fact, I should declare right now that I am one of the most ambitious and dedicated people I have come across. But, I still know that it is my children, my family, and my home that matter to me most, and if I were to lose them, I would lose everything. That's one reason I wanted to write this book, to remind people not to lose all the old values, not to change roles overnight. Women need men, and men need women.

I think a lot of people are beginning to realize that they were in danger of forgetting this, and that's why romance is back. Too many people treat life as though it's the dress rehearsal for some big show. It's not. This is it. You're onstage now. Stop preparing to live -- start living.