Jane Seymour Says She and Christopher Reeve’s Wife Would ‘Tag Team’ Caring for Him After Tragic Accident (Exclusive)

Jane Seymour is opening up about how longtime friend Christopher Reeve inspired her during the last decade of his life.

The actress, 73, presented the best documentary award to Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story at the 2025 AARP Movies for Grownups Awards on Saturday, Feb. 8. Earlier in the evening, Seymour told PEOPLE that she used help care for Reeve, with whom she co-starred in 1980’s Somewhere in Time, when wife Dana Morosini needed a break after the 1995 riding accident that left the Superman actor paralyzed.

“We were very close, and remained very close, but especially after he had the injury. And Dana and I would do tag team, sometimes: when she couldn’t be there, she’d ask me if I had come and run interference,” Seymour explained. “Chris never lost his sense of humor, ever. Ever. I mean, he was funny. He was so much fun. And I think of anyone in the world was my greatest inspiration, because he took a challenge that is inconceivable to have to live that way.”

Seymour noted, as she has previously, how difficult requiring around-the-clock care must have been for Reeve, who valued solitude. “We’d have long conversations about that,” she said. “He said, ‘Now, whether I like it or not, I wake up in the morning.’ He said, ‘Every morning when I wake up, I’ve just come out of a dream in which I’m sailing alone. I’m flying alone. And then I wake up and I hear machines, and then there’s someone there who has to take care of every part of my body.’ ”

The Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman star recalled Reeve explaining that he’d had to learn that those caring for him “bring the outside world with them.”

“I remember listening to him and thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, how hard must that be?’ ” Seymour said.

Reeves’ legacy, which includes the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation, Seymour said, “teaches all of us that everyone in life will have challenges, some more than others.”

“The hardest thing to do is to accept,” she continued. “And if you can accept, open up your heart, reach out to help someone else, you’ll have a purpose. And that is the secret to happiness. And if you have a purpose, then you can feel really good about yourself. When you feel good about yourself, you are like a magnet. People want to be part of something good. They do not want to be around people that go, ‘Oh, life’s so terrible. Why me?’ And they’re attracted to people that are going out making a difference. And that was his attraction. That’s what made him a real Superman.”