In the spring of 1979, on the grounds of the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island, Jane Seymour and Christopher Reeve were filming a story about a man who wills himself across decades for a love he has only seen in a photograph. Off camera, something quieter and more immediate was happening between them. Both were single. They kept it private from most of the cast and crew, but a few people noticed. Seymour later said the affection visible on screen was not entirely invented. For a stretch of weeks the two of them were, in her words, madly in love. Then, on the day they were scheduled to shoot one of the film’s most intimate sequences—the one in which their characters finally connect and then lose each other—Reeve received word that his former partner, Gae Exton, was pregnant. He told Seymour before the cameras rolled. She had to walk into the scene knowing the relationship was ending and still play a woman overtaken by happiness. She has described the effort of holding back tears that were already rising, repeating to herself that her character was happy even as the news settled. By the time the day ended, the romance was over. Reeve returned to Exton; their son Matthew was born later that year. What did not end was the friendship. Over the next twenty-five years they stayed in touch. Seymour named one of her sons Kristopher after him. When Reeve was paralyzed in a riding accident in 1995, the connection held. She remained close to him and to his wife, Dana. At times the two women effectively alternated so that Dana could step away; Seymour has spoken of “tag-teaming” the practical and emotional labor of those years. Reeve’s humor, she has said, never left him. He continued to talk about the mornings when he woke from dreams of sailing or flying alone and found himself surrounded by machines and caregivers instead. Reeve died in 2004 at fifty-two. Dana followed two years later. In later interviews Seymour has returned to the same point: she does not primarily remember him as the actor who played Superman, or even as the brief lover from the set of Somewhere in Time. She remembers him as one of her closest friends—the person with whom something real had begun under the cover of a movie about impossible timing, and who remained part of her life long after the timing of their own romance had run out. The film ends with two people separated by decades who still find each other. In the ordinary years that followed the shoot, Seymour and Reeve managed a quieter version of that persistence. 🌹