Jane Seymour tells the story of the beach photo shoot with Baron Samedi

20-May-2022 • Bond News

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Jane Seymour talked to Entertainment Weekly recently about the memorable 'Live And Let Die' photo that did not come from the filming.

"I was the only woman on the planet that was not trying to be a Bond girl, literally," she said. "That was not the trajectory I was looking for. I was going to go and do Shakespeare and Ibsen and all the classics. They were looking for a virgin to play the High Priestess of Tarot, and I was playing a virgin on television [on Onedin], so I'm assuming they thought I had some memory of that experience. I just remember Roger Moore was lovely. He realized I was so green and didn't know what was going on. I took the whole thing terribly seriously, like it was a major acting role — and they were probably more concerned about how I looked and how my figure was."

Seymour says it was an "amazing experience" shooting in New Orleans and Jamaica. "I stayed in fancy hotels. I had the most amazing costumes," but she most enjoyed spending time with Geoffrey Holder, who starred in the film as the villainous Baron Samedi. "He was a choreographer, and he was rehearsing all the dances for the voodoo sequences," says Seymour. "So whenever I wasn't on one set, I ran over to the other [stage] and joined in the dance. I always felt much more comfortable dancing than I did acting, so it was a perfect combination for me. I'd sort of run off. They'd say, 'Where's Jane?' And someone would say, 'Oh, she's off rehearsing with the voodoo guys.'"

In fact, her downtime with Holder resulted in an iconic image associated with the film. "One day, we went down to the beach in our costumes and we did a sort of dance kind of improvisation on the beach. Someone took photographs of it, and that ended up on all the posters," she says (image below). "It had nothing to do with the movie at all. It was just Geoffrey and I dancing in our costumes."