Jane March

Jane March Horwood (born 20 March 1973) is an English film actress and former model.

March was born Jane March Horwood in Edgware, London. Her father, Bernard Horwood, a design and technology secondary school teacher of English and Spanish ancestry. Her mother, Jean, a newsagent, is Vietnamese and Chinese. March has one brother, a landscape designer.

At age 14, whilst still attending Nower Hill High School in Pinner, north London, March won a local "Become a Model" contest. She signed with Storm Model Management and began working as a print model using her middle name March, which was also her birth month.

After GCSEs, March moved to an apartment in Wimbledon with friends and continued to model before a call to audition in Paris on her 17th birthday following a cover shoot of Just Seventeen which had attracted the attention of French director Jean-Jacques Annaud's wife.March was chosen to play the female lead in 1992 film The Lover, based on a semi-autobiographical novel by Marguerite Duras.

False rumours that the sex scenes between March and her co-star Tony Leung Ka-fai in the film had been real and not simulated led to her being dubbed "The sinner from Pinner". Speaking about the rumours in 2004, March said:

The suggestion that I'd slept with Tony Leung on set was a disgusting allegation. Jean-Jacques Annaud had a lot to do with that – he was trying to promote the film. ... I felt exploited by him. He never dispelled the rumours. He would walk into a room and be ambiguous, which ignited the fire. Everywhere I went in the world, the rumour followed me.

(Several years later, she received an apology from Jean-Jacques Annaud, and she accepted.)

Two years after The Lover, she co-starred with Bruce Willis in the erotic thriller Color of Night (1994), directed by Richard Rush. The script was the first March had received since The Lover. She later said, "I didn't like the script at all, but it was a Bruce Willis film and I wasn't going to turn it down".March also had reservations about the nudity required by the part: she planned to require the filmmakers to alter some nude scenes, but she eventually did not do so because her working experience on the film was very happy. She went on saying, "I wasn't at all comfortable with the nudity in Color of Night. ... At least in The Lover the scenes were relevant to the script. In Color of Night they were just gratuitous." Color of Night became a box office failure, but the film went on doing very well in the home video market and became one of the top 20 most-rented films in the United States in 1995. Maxim magazine also ranked her sex scene in the film as "the Best Sex Scene in film history".

While Color of Night was in production, March began dating the film's co-producer, Carmine Zozzora.The couple married in June 1993 in an 11-minute ceremony at which Willis was the best man and Demi Moore was the maid of honour. According to Color of Night director Richard Rush, Jane March still got a lot of offers from Hollywood studios after the film's release, but Zozzora required the studios to also hire him as the producer for any film March would star in, and most studios did not accept Zozzora's request; it was why March couldn't star in more films.

March and Zozzora separated in 1997 and finally divorced in 2001. A few years later, March was married to Steven Waddington and they have one child.

Film

Television