Jane Seymour recalls her and Christopher Reeve falling 'madly in love' making Somewhere in Time

Somewhere in Time has remained a romantic favorite since it first hit theaters in 1980, but it turns out the real love story went beyond the one on screen.

At the TCM Classic Film Festival this past weekend, Jane Seymour opened up about her and costar Christopher Reeve falling hard for each other while making the time-travel romance. The actress has long spoken of the enduring friendship she and Reeve cultivated on the film but has rarely discussed their romantic relationship.

"Well, here comes the story that I'm officially telling you now, because Chris and I, when we made the film, we literally fell madly in love," Seymour confessed to TCM host Alicia Malone and an audience of several hundred classic movie lovers. "When you see this film, you will see the real thing. But we didn't let anyone know. So a few of the people who worked on the show kind of sussed it out, but we were as subtle as we could be about it."

Seymour has previously acknowledged her romance with Reeve, including on PeopleTV's Couch Surfing, which you can watch above. But she got into the particulars at the TCM festival, becoming visibly emotional when discussing their love for each other and the forces of the universe that broke them apart.

If the revelation of their romance wasn't enough of a case of art imitating life (or vice versa), Seymour also said their relationship ended the same day she filmed the scene in which her character, Elise, loses Reeve's Richard.

"We were madly in love and life was wonderful," she recalled. "We were both single; it was a fantastic, amazing experience. And then one day I came in to work [to film] one of the biggest scenes in the movie… Just before that, Chris had had an earlier call and I came in about half an hour later, and they said, 'Chris needs to talk to you about something.' I thought, 'That's really odd, we've had a long time to talk about things, so what could it be?'

"It was that he was about to have a baby, and that his ex-girlfriend hadn't told him, and that she'd just announced it to the world," Seymour continued. Reeve's ex, Gae Exton, was pregnant with their son, Matthew. (The two would go on to have a second child together, daughter Alexandra.)

But Seymour still had to complete the day's work after hearing this crushing news — filming a scene in which Elise is deliriously in love with Richard after they've made love for the first time, only to lose him to the vagaries of time.

"I then had to put my big-girl pants on," she said. "When I watch that scene, I can literally see the tears coming halfway up my eyeballs. And I just kept saying, 'You can't cry, you can't cry, you can't cry, you're happy. Elise is really, really happy right now.'"

Seymour and Reeve remained lifelong friends, which she recently discussed with EW while reflecting on her most memorable roles. She even named her son Kristopher after her former costar.

"The good part of the story is that Chris went on to have these two beautiful children and we met one another on many occasions," Seymour told the festival audience. "We remained really, really close friends, literally until the day he died. I have to believe that I will one day see him somewhere in time."

Now let me just find my box of tissues…

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