"[10] Over the next decade, while teaching in New York and Los Angeles,[9] Seacat was credited with a number of such breakthroughs, including those of Jessica Lange,[35][36][37] Rachel Ward[38][36] and Marlo Thomas.

[39][40] Also attending those classes were future Songwriter's HOF inductee Desmond Child, then a self-professed "fly on the wall" alongside Lange, Rourke, Michelle Pfeiffer and others.

Speaking in 2018 with Music & Musicians, he gratefully acknowledged Seacat's mentorship, noting the correlation between her early efforts at linking text to actor and Child's later knack for matching song to singer.

[44][45] In 2012 and 2013, Seacat was a faculty member at the annual Film Forum hosted by the University of Arkansas's Winthrop Rockefeller Institute, organized by fellow Actors Studio alumnus Robert Walden.

[13] In February 2018, Seacat and her third husband, Thurn Hoffman, were featured among more than 20 couples seen in the music video for Night Things' cover of The Everly Brothers' 1959 hit "(Till) I Kissed You.

That any such hopes had gone unrealized was the general consensus amongst critics, who were nonetheless divided between those who found such flaws forgivable—such as The Boston Globe ("An Endearing Mess")[58] or Hal Hinson of The Washington Post ("disjointed [but] deliciously addlebrained")[59]—and those who did not, such as Janet Maslin, who dubbed In the Spirit "a nervous new-age comedy more notable for good intentions than good luck,"[60] and the Los Angeles Times, which noted that what begins as "a richly comic" vehicle for Ms. May abruptly "crumbles around her at roughly its halfway point.

"[61] Variety, however, perceived a method to Spirit's messiness, "a throwback to the looser, madcap '60s," featuring "big name talent [working on] a low budget" to make a "pic freed of mainstream good taste and gloss.