There’s a very naughty and very knowing scene at the beginning of the American rom-com Blind Dating. In it, handsome young Chris Pine, Captain Kirk in the Star Trek reboot, is in a therapy session with his analyst, who’s played by older English screen beauty Jane Seymour. Pine’s character is blind, but doesn’t want to accept the fact, which is why he’s seeing a shrink.

There’s a very naughty and very knowing scene at the beginning of the American rom-com Blind Dating. In it, handsome young Chris Pine, Captain Kirk in the Star Trek reboot, is in a therapy session with his analyst, who’s played by older English screen beauty Jane Seymour. Pine’s character is blind, but doesn’t want to accept the fact, which is why he’s seeing a shrink.

He’s also a cherub-faced virgin, which is what prompts Seymour, whose character is clearly having problems maintaining a professional detachment, to slowly and slyly undress. Leaving her long, brunette hair tied up and her black spectacles on, she gets down to a dark bustier, stockings and suspenders before Pine freezes her with a coy look on her face with the line: “Are you naked again, doctor?”

It’s a funny scene in a patchy romantic comedy that’s elevated by nice performances and a refreshingly robust attitude to its titular disability (blind former athlete Tom Sullivan was technical supervisor). It’s also an interesting scene in that it quite cleverly plays on the screen persona of Seymour, who is, if not the original then is certainly the quintessential English rose of cinema and television.

Seymour’s face was the perfect emblem of British beauty to grace the screen and the printed page in film and in advertising long before Helena Bonham Carter, Kate Winslet and Emily Blunt became her heirs. And so there’s a (no doubt intended) cheeky thrill in seeing Seymour strip that’s got less to do with her striking evergreen beauty and everything to do with unpacking her well-established regal professional status.

“I realised I could easily play that role,” Seymour says with a clipped accent, “and that it might be a kind of fun role. I wanted to play it as opposite to the public’s perception of me as I could. It was an interesting role for me.”

This rose was born in Hayes, Middlesex (the bellybutton of England) on 15 February 1951 with another name, Joyce Penelope Wilhemina Frankenberg, the Germanic monikers originating from her father, who was the first generation British son of Eastern European immigrants. Joyce went to stage school in her teens, where she learned to dance, sing, design and act and where – as was de rigour at the time – she was informed she must adopt a stage name if she was to make a career in showbiz.

One friend suggested Jane and another Seymour, and later it clicked that they’d unconsciously chosen the name of Henry VIII’s third wife, who was – coincidentally – a Tudor rose.

Seymour made her film debut in an uncredited role as a chorus girl in Richard Attenborough’s 1969 First World War musical satire Oh! What A Lovely War (during the making of which she met the first of her four husbands, the director’s son Michael).

Following that inauspicious acting debut, Seymour’s new family connection secured her a bigger part in her father-in-law’s Churchill biopic Young Winston, and her good looks got her cast as tarot card-reading Bond girl Solitaire opposite new 007 Roger Moore in 1973’s Live and Let Die. That’s the role for which Seymour remains best known. It boosted her profile sufficiently to make a star of her on both sides of the Atlantic and lay the foundations for a lengthy acting career.

Much of that has been in television, and while it may not be as memorable as the work of some of her contemporaries, Seymour won a Golden Globe for a 1981 small screen version of East of Eden and an Emmy playing Maria Callas in 1988’s Onassis: The Richest Man in the World.

She also made at least one cinematic gem in the criminally overlooked 1980 time travel romance Somewhere in Time, written by Richard Matheson, a precursor to The Time Traveller’s Wife in which Christopher Reeve’s playwright hypnotises himself back into the past to woo a woman he’s seen in an old painting.

And between 1993 and 1998 Seymour had a moderate hit in the television series Dr Quinn, Medicine Woman, a cross between Quincy and Deadwood, which was popular enough to produce two TV movie follow-ups.

“Although I live and work in America,” Seymour says, “I still feel British. I come back to England when I can, of course, but my family is in the US.”

On the surface, and at heart, Seymour might be as English as the Tudor mansion outside Bath that she used to own. But although she was presented with an OBE by the Queen in 1993, Seymour was by then already living in America, where she became a naturalised citizen (holding a joint UK/US passport) in 2005.

The reality of her life today is she lives far removed from England in Malibu, California, where she has made a life and living with her fourth husband, the actor-director James Keach, with whom she has twin teenage boys. If all that sounds as American as apple pie, then Seymour’s entertainment business savvy confirms she’s well assimilated into her adopted country’s culture.

Seymour’s something of a renaissance woman. As well as acting she produces films, paints and exhibits, authors self-help, health and children’s books, undertakes voluntary humanitarian work and is a mother (of four – she has two grown children from her third marriage). How does she find the time?

“Well,” she says, “recently the acting has been in smaller roles in independent films, where they condense the amount of time I have to be on set. And the producing is done in conjunction with my husband’s company. But I paint as much as I can and I design jewellery and furnishings. The reason I do all these things is because I enjoy them all. And I’m very self-motivated. I don’t sit around waiting until someone gives me permission.”

Of all her guises, though, it’s Solitaire that leaves a lasting impression. Of playing her, Seymour says, “It was the biggest thing that ever happened in my life. I was 20 years old. I’d never been to America or Jamaica. It was very exciting. And I grew up with Roger Moore, The Saint, as a pin-up. He was very kind to me. So, it was all very glamorous.”

Being a Bond girl made Seymour’s career, but it’s not her favourite film. That remains Somewhere in Time, a film that virtually vanished without a trace when it was first released, but which has slowly built a following over the years since.

“That was one of my favourite experiences,” Seymour says without hesitation. “Maybe because of my relationship with Chris, who became a lifelong friend. It was a special little movie, but it was barely released. We weren’t allowed to do any publicity, because there was an actor’s strike that week.

“What’s so great about Somewhere in Time, though, is the public eventually discovered it. So it’s a movie I’m very proud of.”

And one in which Seymour played not an English rose but an American beauty, proving that she could turn heads on both sides of the Atlantic.

Blind Dating is in cinemas tomorrow.