Jane Seymour gets wild in her new murder-mystery series

Jane Seymour in the TV series Harry Wild streaming on Acorn TV.

In her new series Harry Wild, Jane Seymour gleefully gets to act up. In the series, which is streaming on the Brit-centric streaming service AcornTV, she stars as the titular character, a blunt-talking, former literature professor turned amateur detective who is very much the embodiment of a modern woman.

"I'm just so thrilled," she smiles from her lounge in Malibu, "because I know a lot of women my age who would like to be Harry Wild - me included."

She says she took an instant liking to Wild while reading the script for the first time.

"I went 'Wow. This is a woman I like,' she laughs. "She's a woman who doesn't take fools gladly, she speaks her mind, she's smart and she knows she's usually right. She's very independent too. If she wants a man, she doesn't marry him, she just has him and bye-bye. Next! I thought she was a really fun character."

In fact, the whole show's fun. It's filmed in the moody style of a classic British murder mystery but punctuated with lots of little comedic moments to give it a unique tone. But don't let the jokes fool you; the murders are grizzly and the mysteries will leave you scratching your head until Wild puzzles it all using her knowledge of English literature by the end of each episode.

"We do end up solving some very bizarre cases," she says. "Really bizarre. I'd never even imagine some of these crimes."

So while she loved the character, it was an instant yes to returning to lead a series.

"I thought to myself, 'Why at this age do I want to do a series?'" the 71-year-old actress reveals. "The last time I did a series was [1998's] Dr Quinn, Medicine Woman. At the time everyone said, 'Don't do it, it will kill you because you're a woman in the lead and it will never be picked up as a series.' Well, I signed immediately and the next thing I know I did seven years of that. So I know how hard this work is."

Even though she's consistently had roles in both film and television she admits that leading a series was a daunting prospect at first and that initially, she felt some pressure.

"On the first day, I went, 'Argh!' I'm never gonna be able to learn nine to 10 pages a day, I can't remember if I brushed my teeth or took my meds," she jokes, before saying that there was an iPad teleprompter on set in case she forgot her lines. "It was never opened. Never used it once. Never. I didn't even know it existed but they bought it just in case the old lady - me! - couldn't remember her lines. Which I did, by the way, every single line."

As well as being an amateur detective, Wild is also a wannabe writer, with one very funny scene showing her sitting down to write in the middle of the day, before immediately getting up again to get a glass of wine and flicking on the TV. As she's the author of several books I wonder if she ever suffered that same sort of procrastination while penning her books.

"When I focus on something, that's it. That's what I'm doing to the exclusion of everything else," she says "The interesting thing is I could never write but I could do interviews. I realised I was endlessly doing interviews so I thought, 'I wonder what would happen if I just interviewed myself?' That's how I did it. When I wrote books I would write out what I wanted to say, what I thought the book was about, and then I asked myself the questions and recorded it. Then I found that I didn't have to record it. I just wrote it longhand on yellow pads."

Her most famous is 1986's self-help book, Jane Seymour's Guide to Romantic Living. Having lived a life since then I ask if she was to update it what would be the one or two new tips she'd add.

"Okay," she says with a mock assertiveness. "First of all, I'd wish I hadn't done it because it was talking about this wonderful husband of mine and our relationship. All of which went seriously belly up. The bad news is it cost me everything in my life, including my sanity and definitely my financials. The good news is that because I was so deeply desperate I ended up doing Dr Quinn Medicine Woman. So I have him, and that, to thank for it."

As well as acting and writing, Seymour's also an accomplished painter, sculptor and photographer. A true artisan, she says creativity is the thing she loves most in life.

"That's the juice that I live on. It's not about fame, it's not about money or anything like that. I love that juice when it's going," she says. Whether I hear music and I dance to it or I'm painting or I'm acting or doing photography … That's my excitement in life, Any kind of creativity, for me, turns me on."

THE LOWDOWN
Who: Jane Seymour
What: Murder-mystery series Harry Wild
Where: Streaming now on AcornTV.