Jane Seymour has lived one of the most quietly extraordinary lives in the entire history of Hollywood — a journey that began in England, carried her through Bond girl immortality as Solitaire in Live and Let Die, across an Emmy-winning dramatic performance in East of Eden, and into the living rooms of a generation of devoted American families through nearly a decade of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman — but of every chapter in a life that has never lacked for remarkable moments, none has shaped her more completely or more permanently than the one that almost ended everything.

During a filming in Spain in 1988, Jane Seymour was given an injection that triggered a severe allergic reaction and her heart stopped — and in the moments that followed, in the space between the life she had been living and the one she would go on to build, she experienced something so profound, so completely outside the boundaries of anything her rational mind had a framework for, that the woman who came back from that experience looked at the world, at her work, at the relationships she had taken for granted, and at the deepest questions of what any of it meant, with entirely new eyes — a transformation so total and so lasting that everyone who knew her before and after describes it as the clearest before-and-after of a remarkable life.