Jane Seymour recalled Saturday when director Richard Attenborough picked her out of a crowd of chorus girls for a part as an uncredited extra in his 1969 musical comedy Oh! What a Lovely War.

“The late Richard Attenborough was the man that picked me literally out of the chorus when I was 17 years old, and I had been told I could never dance again because I had hurt my knee,” Seymour recalled. “And the lovely Maggie Smith was there… and she took me aside, and she said, ‘Well, you’re not going to be in the chorus very long.’ And I said, ‘Oh, why?’ She said, ‘you stick out.’”

“I thought that was a bad thing, because I was supposed to be doing everything the same as all the actors,” Seymour added.

But the moment led her to a life of acting that has been, she said, “the most incredible privilege in the world.”

Seymour shared the memory while accepting the Legacy Award at Leonard Maltin’s Industry Tribute at the beloved Coronado Island Film Festival, held on the idyllic, historic Hollywood retreat across the water from San Diego.

The star of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman and the current series Harry Wild was honored alongside film journalist Claudia Puig, recipient of the Leonard Maltin Award; Fanthropology founder Bettina Sherrick, winner of the Trailblazer Award; anti-biopic icons Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, winners of the Screenwriters Award; and Sing Sing star Clarence Maclin, winner of the Industry Impact award.

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Maclin stars in Sing Sing as a younger version of himself. The film is focused on the Sing Sing Correctional Facility’s Rehabilitation Through the Arts program, in which he participated while serving a sentence for robbery. Upon his release, he became a youth counselor and gang-intervention specialist before being cast in the acclaimed film.

Jane Seymour. Photo by Amanda SanMartin Photography, courtesy of the Coronado Island Film Festival.

Maclin noted that he had grown up watching many of the attendees of the festival onscreen.

“I want to say that art has saved my life,” he said as he accepted his award. “Had it not been for this story telling magnet that brought me to this? I don’t know where I would be. But I’m proud to be here with you receiving this.”

Sing Sing was among many award contenders that screened at the Coronado Island Film Festival, which concluded Sunday after five eventful days.

Tributes From, and to, Leonard Maltin

Larry Karaszewski honored Leonard Maltin even as Maltin honored him and Alexander, his writing partner on films from Ed Wood to The People vs. Larry Flynt to Dolemite Is My Name. He noted that he and Alexander were longtime devotees to Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide. a book of capsule reviews that was published from 1969 through 2014.

“I grew up in the South Bend, Indiana in the ’70s, long before the Internet existed. You didn’t have things like IMDB or Letterbox, and so to get information about movies as a young movie nerd, there was only one source, and it was Leonard Maltin in his book. … I would look to those books and say, What did he give four stars to? What did he give a bomb to?”

He added slyly: “We have both. We’ve written bombs and we’ve written four-star things. And we still love him, no matter what he says about our movies.”

Alexander wore a Marx Brothers tie, he said, because he had learned so much about the Marx Brothers from reading Maltin. In the early days of his guides, Alexander said, “he was having to go into revival houses in New York City with a tape recorder in his coat so he could tape the movie — there was no other way to know this information.”

“Leonard’s work was so extraordinary and meant so much to me,” he concluded.

Main image (L-R): Scott Alexander, Leonard Maltin, Claudia Puig, Bettina Sherrick, Larry Karaszewski, Jane Seymour and Clarence Maclin. Photo by Amanda SanMartin Photography, courtesy of the Coronado Island Film Festival.