Jane Seymour on Helping ‘Dr. Quinn’ Co-Star Joe Lando Through Fire Tragedy: “There Is Huge Love Between Our Families”
From 1993 to 1998, Jane Seymour and Joe Lando shared the small screen on Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, the beloved CBS Western. The sparks were very evidently there — they dated briefly while shooting the pilot — but the two quickly realized they were meant to be lifelong friends and have remained so, through thick and thin, over the years. In 2022, the reunited for the Lifetime movie A Christmas Spark, which became one of the network’s top-rated holiday movies.
Lando, 63, shared his Pacific Palisades home with his wife, three children and daughter-in-law, two dogs (a German Shepherd named Bo and a Border Collie Lab named Rosie) and two parakeets. Like Lando, Seymour, 73, who lives not very far away in Malibu, was evacuated for the fires. She was put up by a family friend in Calabasas with whom she happens to share an ex-husband. “We raised our children together,” she says. “We have been friends since the beginning, which people never believe, but it’s true.”
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Thankfully, her home still stands. Lando’s, however, is no more. A typically private man, he shared his sorrow and loss for the house he lovingly tended to for years on Instagram. Lando is now processing the trauma of losing everything while trying to maneuver the red-tape of submitting FEMA and insurance reports. Seymour and her musician boyfriend John Zambetti have welcomed Lando’s family and menagerie into their home.
“Everybody’s doing great,” Lando reports of his brood. “The dogs seem a little confused as to what’s going on. We haven’t had a chance to bring them back to our house and let them know there is no more house to go back to. But I think they need to know about the place, because they’re going to be waiting to go back.”
Seymour spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about the experience of being there for the Landos in their time of great need.
Whereas Joe and I have always been close, we’re now obviously super close. We are living together, we are cooking together, we’re commiserating together. When this all happened and I just immediately said, “Joe, come here.” And they did. He has quite a big family — four kids, one of them has a wife, two dogs, two budgies and him and his wife. But I know that they’re comfortable here. They’ve been here many times and they know the house really well.
Joe has always — just like his character on Dr. Quinn — run around saying, “I can fix this. This needs to fixing, Jane. I can do this.” That’s who he is and where he comes from. He used to be a cook, a long time ago. He has a little camping propane gas stove. And we have no gas at the house currently. So he set up a little kitchen outside.
Through all this, we’ve been realizing how much we all love one another and how we always come together for one another. They’ve always been there for me. I know what it felt like to walk away from my home on countless occasions where I thought, “Well, that’s it. We’ve lost everything.” And to have to put whatever random things I could at the last minute into bags. And now here I am with everything and they literally have nothing. They have the clothes on their backs. They thought they’d maybe be gone a day or two.
The unbelievable generosity of people — everyone I know has been sending clothes and buying things. My housekeeper just went and bought a shirt for Joe and a track suit for [his wife] Kirsten. The person I know with the least literally immediately came up with the thing that put a smile on their faces. And it wasn’t random clothing. She’d shopped for it, specifically knowing what would suit them and what would fit and what they’d like. Joe just started crying. My partner John’s allergic to dogs, but we’ve become a dog compound. They come right up to him.
But there’s an amazing uplift to this — how close we all are and how much we have a sense of gratitude for being able to help one another. And his family have always been there to help me. There is this huge amount of love between our families.
Joe and I met on Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, so that’s 34 years ago. We were together [romantically] very briefly when we did the pilot and then broke up, and then they picked up our show. And it was difficult times sometimes, but there was always a bond that we’ve always had. And then after the show, we became really, really close friends again. And I very much so with his wife, Kirsten and his kids. And I’ve always had my home open to their family, always, regardless of catastrophes. Our kids all kind of grew up together. His kids are a little bit younger than mine, but I think his boys definitely grew up in a lot of my son’s clothes.
I’m about to embark on doing some sort of working on autobiography. And I was looking at my collection, just mountains of memorabilia from Dr. Quinn and from back in the day and everything. I have it all here. And I just kept thinking, “What do I do with all this?” Finding these photographs, looking at these old letters that people wrote, stuff that I’ve written about how I was feeling when I was going through major things in my life. And I was just looking at all of this and just thinking, “That’s what you lose.” But what you don’t lose is your memories and your feelings for people.
With all the crisis that goes on in the world, sometimes when something catastrophic like this happens, you start seeing who the real people are and what they find they’re able to do even when they themselves are suffering. And that’s what gives me hope in the world, because at the end of the day, we are all basically humans on this tiny speck in the universe.
My mom, she came through three-and-a-half years in the Japanese camp in Indonesia [in World War 2], and she couldn’t talk about it. She put away the bad stuff, compartmentalized it, wouldn’t talk about it. But in the present, oh my God, my house was full of people all the time. We used to call them “the ways and strays,” but there didn’t have to be a fire for our home to be a sort of a center for whatever we could do to share. That was normal in my home.
And I just keep thinking that my mom was right. She said, “The way you heal is by opening up your heart and reaching out to help someone else. If you have a purpose, you can love yourself and you can move forward in life.” You don’t have to look very far to find someone worse off than you.
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