Bond girl Jane Seymour selling Somerset estate after feud

Jane Seymour, the former Bond girl, is quietly offering her Somerset estate to potential buyers after a feud with local residents over its use for corporate functions - reports The Times.

A Russian businessman recently offered to pay more than £10m, and representatives of von Essen, the hotel chain, have also inspected the property, according to local sources.

Property finders – who act discreetly for wealthy buyers by identifying houses that are not on the open market but may be bought for the right price – are telling their clients that Seymour can be persuaded to part with St Catherine’s Court.

Mark Strutt, 59, a land agent who lives near Seymour’s property, said that she had long been trying to sell it.

“I think she’s been seeking a private buyer for years, but I don’t think anybody wants to pay her price,” he said.

A £10m price tag overvalued the property, he said. “It’s a modest Cotswolds manor house, it’s not Blenheim.”

He added: “If it is purchased by someone who wants to live in it as a normal house, we’d be frightfully pleased.”

A spokesman for Seymour denied that she and her fourth husband James Keach, a film director and actor, were “actively trying to sell” St Catherine’s Court.

Last month Seymour told The Sunday Times: “I love St Catherine’s more than anything in the world . . . I have spent a fortune on it and, in my only spare time, I grab my family, my friends, and we all go there and we enjoy quintessential England.”

Keach said at the time the row with neighbours became public: “We have been approached by real estate people about selling the property since all this blew up . . . It’s the last thing we want to do, but never say never.”

Seymour’s popularity among her neighbours plummeted earlier this year after she successfully applied for a 24-hour alcohol and entertainment licence for the house, which she rents out for weddings and corporate functions.

Complaints grew over noise and traffic problems caused by delivery vans and large lorries visiting the house and revellers coming and going.

During the summer, 50 locals protested against the late-night parties by invading Seymour’s 15-acre estate and forming a procession behind a Land Rover that blared out brass-band music from its speakers.

As they presented a 200-signature petition to Seymour’s estate manager, her butler offered them tea and coffee.

After the protest Seymour rounded on her critics and accused them of being “inebriated by their own verbosity”, adding: “By attacking a celebrity, they got to be famous.”

Seymour, who starred in the 1973 James Bond film Live and Let Die as Solitaire, an enigmatic fortune teller, lives mainly in Malibu, near Los Angeles in California. She spends a maximum of three months a year at St Catherine’s Court, which is grade I listed and has 13 bedrooms.

An appeal is to be heard against the granting of the alcohol licence next month.

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