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Joeann
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Jane Seymour has played opera diva Maria Callas, French queen Marie Antoinette and
been a Bond girl - but her own story trumped them all, in Who Do You
Think You Are?
Who Do You Think You Are?
Rating:
The TV That Made Me
Rating:
Jane Seymour has played opera diva Maria Callas and French queen Marie Antoinette.
She has been a Bond girl — Solitaire, opposite Roger Moore in Live And Let Die — and the
woman who forced Edward VIII to abdicate, American adventuress
Wallis Simpson.
But her own story trumped them all, in Who Do You Think
You Are?
(BBC1). If family history could win Oscars, her tale of heroism and cruel
tragedy during the Holocaust would take every prize.
Now in its 12th series, Who Do You Think You Are? usually delves into celebrity ancestry, digging back half a dozen generations.
This episode was dramatically different: it focused solely on two of Jane's close family, her father's aunts, Michaela
and Jadwiga, who were Polish Jews.
That was the first twist in the story: Miss Seymour was born Joyce Frankenberg, and borrowed her stage name from one of Henry VIII's queens to create the image of an English rose.
Straight away this felt like a departure from the established formula,
and not just because Jane, instead of marching off to the archives office
as the show's guests generally do, flew from her Malibu mansion in California straight to Warsaw, a city of grey apartment blocks and tram-cars.
Her search felt urgent, almost as if she could find her great-aunts and cousins alive if she looked hard enough.
That was a grim illusion, because her own father, John, had gone to Belsen concentration camp immediately after World War II on the same desperate, fruitless mission.
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But the records showed Michaela and Jadwiga had somehow survived the war.
Both women were married to doctors, highly respected men who had used all their influence in an attempt
to save their families.
If family history could win Oscars, her tale of heroism and
cruel tragedy during the Holocaust would take every prize.
Pictured are Jane Seymour 's ancestors: (L-R) Great uncle Herman Temerson, Jerzy Temerson, Hanna Temerson and great aunt Jadwiga Temerson
Jane Seymour flew from her Malibu mansion in California straight to Warsaw to trace the history
of her relatives such as Hanna Temerson (left)
- just as her own father John Frankenberg (right) had gone to Belsen concentration camp immediately after World War II to
search for family survivors
A family Portrait (1930) shows (Far R) Jadwiga Temerson, Jane's great aunt, (2nd
from L) Michaela Singalowsky, Jane's great aunt,
(4th from L) John Frankenberg, Jane's father, (3rd from L) Lewin Frankenberg, Jane's grandfather
Jadwiga's husband was murdered by a German soldier,
shot dead at a window during the Nazi retreat from Poland towards the end of the war.
But he had managed to smuggle his wife and children out of the Warsaw ghetto
where tens of thousands were starving to death.
The rare photographs that have survived from that time are so horrific — skeletal
bodies lying in the streets, hollow-eyed children seized by death squads —
that they seem remote, almost medieval, even though they were
taken less than 75 years ago.
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It was Jane's presence that helped us remember how
recent this horror was. She was dressed for Warsaw
in filmstar style, with a hat like a furry bicycle wheel.
But she had no irritating Hollywood mannerisms, and when she wept for Jadwiga's slaughtered children, her
tears were not effects for the camera.
Michaela's story followed a different thread — flight from
Paris where her husband was working to help Jewish refugees, betrayal by the French
Vichy government and eventual escape to Switzerland.
The sisters were reunited in 1946, but this proved the bitterest twist of all.
Racked with grief for her children and petrified of being sent back to Soviet-occupied Poland,
Jadwiga took her own life. This episode had none of the flavour of an academic detective
story that usually makes the show pleasantly engrossing.
It was as raw and painful as a Polish winter.
Brian Conley's latest guest was Ann Widdecombe, remembering her schooldays as a convent girl
Personal history as light entertainment is the theme of The TV That Made Me (BBC1), a mixture of chat and
telly clips showing every afternoon. Brian Conley's latest guest was Ann
Widdecombe, remembering her schooldays as a convent girl and its highlight — crowding round the black-and-white set
in the third-form common room to watch Richard Chamberlain as
Doctor Kildare.
There was a strongly religious thread to her best-loved shows, from Patrick Troughton as St
Paul in 1960's Paul Of Tarsus, to Derek Jacobi as the monastic sleuth Brother Cadfael in the Nineties.
But Ann's got a rebellious streak, too, and
she wanted to see footage from the Fifties rock 'n' roll show Six-Five Special, and the
racy Eighties soap Howard's Way.
The trouble is that, because of copyright fees, the clips are
just a few seconds long, leaving us longing to see more.
Paul Of Tarsus deserves a full re-run. So does Howards' Way, come
to that.
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