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 Four

Chapter Three: Bringing Romance to Everyday Life

The dictionary tells us that a romance is a tale with scenes and incidents, remote from everyday life. But romance needn't be remote. It can be part of everyday life.

It is easy to become so weighed down by work and worry that you cease to notice the marvels all around you. Some years ago, I was playing Ophelia up in the North of England and staying in awful digs miles away from any family or friends. I was very depressed, very hemmed in by the bad weather and gloomy city. Then someone suggested that a group of us go for a drive. We piled into a car, and it wasn't long before we found ourselves on the most beautiful moors, covered with mist, like a scene from Macbeth. We were ten feet apart and yet we couldn't see each other. We kept appearing and disappearing through the mist. The atmosphere was very strange, very romantic, very beautiful. And those moors, the Yorkshire Moors, had been there all the time, just a short distance away from the town we were complaining about so much.

That is the point: the extraordinary is always there, waiting just around a corner, only a car ride away--all you have to do is break the pattern of depression or gloom or stifling ordinariness to find it. If you're fed up, look at a map and find the nearest green space. It might be the site of a ruined castle. It might be covered in bluebells. You might arrive there just as a storm breaks out and you can sit in the car as the rain batters against the windows and reminds you how close you are all the time to the rain, and the lightning, and the sea, and all the things that make life splendid. Anything might happen.

Don't be someone so busy achieving, overreaching, that you never really notice anything. Live in the present, not in the future. Don't lose your imagination, you capacity to live and enjoy the present. Above all, don't be afraid to do something different.

Your imagination and invention can be the fairy godmother that transforms you from Cinderella into the beautiful woman who stuns everyone at the ball. It really can. You can be anyone, do anything. Anything can happen, from now on.

The passive, dreamily "romantic" girl of the past is finished with. We don't want to return to that. We don't want to be dim, pretty, passive creatures, however much some men might think they like that. I am arguing for women becoming actively, positively, imaginatively romantic: combining the genuine advances of feminism without most precious qualities: femininity, intuition, imagination.

If you feel you would like to wear a velvet gown but don't dare: dare. If you can't afford one: make it yourself. Learn to sew, and sew beautifully. Nothing is impossible if you want it enough. When I was out of work as an actress in England, I used to embroider blouses for me, my friends, and to sell in top London shops. The embroidery looked difficult but with concentration and patience it wasn't at all. Never be put off because something looks difficult. If you concentrate properly you can do anything. If you allow yourself to be distracted-to flit from subject to subject-you'll do nothing well.

Feminism tells us to take charge of our own destinies. There is nothing wrong with that. But I'm arguing for something slightly different: don't take charge of your destiny merely to compete with men. In doing so you admittedly gain a great deal-status, money, respect-but you are liable to lose a great deal too. You can lose your femininity. You can turn men into frightened weaklings, emasculated creatures with whom you wouldn't want to have an affair even if they summoned up the courage to ask you. Have the sense to hold onto your femininity.

You can be the heroine of your own life. Use your determination, your courage, your self-respect, all those things that feminism has helped to give us, to become a romantic heroine. Heroines are all around us: Jane Fonda is one of mine. But there are so many others, from the past as well as the present: there's Cleopatra, Catherine the Great, Florence Nightingale, Mary Shelley, Gertrude Bell and other women travelers, writers Colette, Jane Austen, the Brontes. Examine their lives. What is it about each one that you admire so much? Why shouldn't you be like that? What is stopping you? It isn't enough merely to dream-add just something of their splendor to you own, more ordinary, life.

Take the great French writer Colette, for instance. Of all her love affairs, the deepest and most passionate was with nature. In childhood her mother had showed her how to look and to wonder. When Colette was close to death, lying in her Paris flat, crippled with arthritis, "Look-look," she said and tried to raise her arm to point at the bird on her window sill, her eyes as fresh with excitement and wonder as when she was a child. Of all her achievements and dramas, that is what I respect most. She kept her freshness. And that is something anyone can do if they try. You can learn to look. Even if you are not a good artist it is worth putting aside a little time every now and again to try to draw a tree, or a person, or a bird, or a flower. By trying to draw you can learn to see. You can observe what is extraordinary about an ordinary bird, as Colette did. Someone who observes the world, who is close to the world, will be close to her own self, too.

There have been many times in my life when I have been too active, too busy trying. Make sure that you are able to accomplish the transition from busy, successful, struggling woman to the other kind of woman, the kind who is understanding and warm. That woman, who is also part of you, is equally extraordinary.

Many of my heroines aren't famous; they're friends of mine, in Los Angeles and in England, who live their lives well. Some are old friends, dating from far back before I became a film star; others I met when following the Jane Fonda pregnancy workout course. Some manage a career as well as children, some devote themselves to their children, remaining calm and being marvelous mothers and wives.

You have all kinds of potential inside you. Perhaps you have the potential to be a great writer like Colette. Perhaps you have the potential to be a great cook. Perhaps you could be pianist. Or perhaps you could be a marvelous wife and mother. Learn from your heroines-bring their brilliance into your life.

Discover all these figures that lurk inside you, waiting for you to find the key to unlock them. Sometimes reading about your heroines or heroes can help to unlock these prisoners inside you. You mustn't just read about Colette and think, "Gosh, what an amazing woman; I wish I could be like that," and then do nothing about it. You must make the connections. Ask questions. How could I be like that, even just a little like that? How can I convert my life into hers? How can I be like her? What lessons are there for me from her life? Don't just admire from afar. When you watch television, don't just dreamily stare at the scene in which a couple make love by the fireside: instead, make love by the fireside. Don't live your life at secondhand. Live it firsthand, in the present, and live it well. Let the television and the films inspire you, give you ideas to make your life extraordinary however ordinary it might seem to others.

You don't have to attempt a replica of the life of your heroine: just add some aspects of her extraordinary life into your life. You might change your life in ways few other people would notice. But you'll notice. You'll see better, hear better, find a new quality to living, a new way of loving.

Ballerinas were my heroines as a child. I started going to the local ballet school when I was tiny. Because of my knee injury I didn't achieve my dream of becoming a ballerina--oh, I danced in Festival Hall, I attended a full-time ballet school, I tried to become Margot Fonteyn--but I incorporate dancing into my everyday life. It doesn't matter that I'm not onstage at Covent Garden, that I'm not out there in that other, fairy-tale world of lost loves, of graceful movements, of dying swans, of sating and lace, of witches and princesses. Whenever I see a large space, I dance. Dancing is a physical way of expressing yourself. It's feeling something inside and expressing it without the use of words. And it's a very sensual, sexy way of communicating with your body. I dance barefoot or I put on my toe or tap shoes. I dance all by myself, or with my daughter, Katie, or with my mother and sisters, whoever happens to be visiting. We dance either in the huge empty ballroom of the house in England or on the grassy lawns outside. And wherever I go I take my toe shoes, carefully stuffed with potpourri. They were my dream and my reality for such a long time it is hard to renounce them.

Anyone who has a lawn can be a prima ballerina. Anyone can be Margot Fonteyn. Don't gawk at those who seem to you to live extraordinary lives. That's not the way. Learn what you can from the qualities they have instead of envying their happiness or successes. Take those qualities into your own life. Try to be a better person, a happier person. And if you envy them their ability to dance and are ashamed of your inability, just dance while no one is looking, and then you can be the best ballerina in the world. Or act. When on one's around, act out plays in front f the mirror just as you did when you were a child. So you'll never be the best actress in the world-but no one will know. If you're brave enough you can join an amateur acting club.

Follow your passions. Don't think that to be happy you have to be famous or publicly successful. That's another trap of our society, which worships success. The most successful person in the world is probably someone nobody has ever heard of; he or she has lived her life well, with happiness, dignity, imagination. Now that is an extraordinary life. As pressure on families and relationships increases, there is even more reason for people to learn how to live, rather than just learn how to work. Life is not only your accomplishments; it's what you do in your private life when there is no one to applaud you. You don't have to build a business empire or be a great artist to be immortal. You pass on a way of life to your children. You can bequeath them happiness and a sense of proportion and a capacity to be romantic. Remember that romance doesn't just mean men and sex; it is a way of looking at life, a way of living, of being happy and special.

One of my happiest moments, which put everything in proportion, was during the premier of the James Bond film Live and Let Die, when I was meeting the Queen. I was very tense, worried about whether I would look good, if I would behave properly, how the film would be received. Then, at the back of the a crowd at the bottom of some steps, I saw my father, nodding his head, saying just from the look on his face that he was proud of me, that he didn't want to disturb me, but that he was there. I realized that none of the glitter mattered to him and instantly it no longer mattered to me.

Private life, private moments, are what matter. Public life is of small consequence compared to private happiness.

If you feel that the world's grown dull, that you can't see anything marvelous, just get up very early one day and walk through the familiar streets you thought were so dull. You'll see they are transformed-suddenly they are strange, magical, mysterious: the dull dry-cleaning shop suddenly looks distinctly odd, the coffee shop is different now it's empty. And the air feels different, fresher, newer, as it renews you.

Don't obey the rules. Don't get up when everyone else gets up. If you want to keep all those other, marvelous, selves inside you prisoners, then do as you've always done and as everyone else does. But if you want to free them, you have to free yourself, change your pattern, jolt the old, familiar things into new, unfamiliar things.

If there's a window near where you're reading this, look out of it. Really look. Observe. Look at the colors, the movement of the wind, the shape of things. If you look long and hard enough you'll see a new world just outside your window.

You don't have to go to the ends of the world to find the miraculous: the miraculous is right outside your window if you only look. And it's right inside your heart.