Jane Fonda

Jane Fonda: The Art of the Third Act

In the autumn of 2019 a woman of eighty-one in a red coat was arrested on the steps of the United States Capitol on four Fridays running. She had moved to Washington to do it, planned fourteen consecutive weeks of it, and was clear-eyed about the terms of her own participation. "I from white privilege," she told NPR. "I'm famous on top of that. So everything is going to be very nice and polite." The coat was the last garment she intended to buy, chosen because Greta Thunberg had said the house was on fire. Six decades earlier she had been a Vogue cover model who was not sure she could act.

Henry Fonda's Daughter

She was born in New York City on 21 December 1937, the daughter of Henry Fonda and Frances Ford Seymour, a Canadian-born socialite. In 1950, when Jane was twelve, her mother died by suicide while under psychiatric care at Craig House in Beacon, New York; Fonda would disclose decades later that her mother had suffered repeated sexual abuse as a child. Her brother Peter also became an actor. She was educated at the Emma Willard School in Troy and at Vassar, and modelled — twice on the cover of *Vogue* — before settling on what she was.

Vassar to the Actors Studio

The decisive encounter came in 1958, when she met Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio. She has described it as the first time anyone outside her father's obligatory encouragement told her she had talent, and the first time she believed it. Her Broadway debut in *There Was a Little Girl* (1960) brought a Tony nomination; her screen debut, *Tall Story*, came the same year.

Barbarella to Bree Daniels

The 1960s made her a star of a limiting kind. *Walk on the Wild Side* (1962) won her a Golden Globe as most promising newcomer; *Cat Ballou* (1965) made her bankable; *Barbarella* (1968), directed by her first husband Roger Vadim, made her a sex symbol and very nearly a punchline.

Then *They Shoot Horses, Don't They?* (1969) and her first Academy Award nomination. Pauline Kael, reviewing it, wrote that Fonda "has been a charming, witty nudie cutie" but now had "a chance at an archetypal character," and predicted she might "dominate our movies in the seventies as Bette Davis did in the thirties." She was right. Fonda won Best Actress for *Klute* (1971), as the call girl Bree Daniels — Kael called her means "extraordinarily economical" and judged that "there isn't another young dramatic actress in American films who can touch her" — and again for *Coming Home* (1978). She was nominated for *Julia* (1977), *The China Syndrome* (1979), *On Golden Pond* (1981) and *The Morning After* (1986); by the late 1970s the *Motion Picture Herald* rated her Hollywood's most bankable actress. *9 to 5* (1980), with Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton, took over a hundred million dollars domestically.

Hanoi

She had opposed the war since the 1960s, co-founded the FTA tour of military towns with Donald Sutherland in 1971, and travelled to Hanoi in July 1972 to see the bombing damage to the dikes. There she was photographed sitting on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun. The image produced the name "Hanoi Jane" and a hostility that has never entirely dissipated: Naval Academy plebes shouted it as a nightly ritual; a veteran spat tobacco in her face at a book signing in 2005; as recently as 2024 a Los Angeles County proclamation had to be moved off 30 April after objections from Vietnamese Americans.

Her position has been consistent for forty years. She apologised to veterans in a 1988 interview with Barbara Walters, calling the photograph "the most horrible thing I could possibly have done," and has described it as "a two-minute lapse of sanity that will haunt me forever." She has not apologised for opposing the war or for the radio broadcasts: "Our government was lying to us and men were dying because of it." Allegations that American prisoners were tortured in order to meet her have repeatedly been shown to be false.

The Workout

In 1982, recovering from an ankle fracture sustained on *The China Syndrome*, she released *Jane Fonda's Workout*. It became the highest-selling VHS tape ever made and is credited with driving household adoption of the video recorder itself. Twenty-odd further videos followed, selling more than seventeen million copies, along with five books and thirteen audio programmes. The proceeds funded the Campaign for Economic Democracy, the organisation she ran with her second husband, Tom Hayden.

She married Ted Turner in 1991 and retired from acting for fifteen years. She came back with *Monster-in-Law* (2005), returned to Broadway in *33 Variations* (2009) after a forty-six-year absence, played Nancy Reagan in *The Butler* (2013), and spent seven seasons opposite Lily Tomlin in Netflix's *Grace and Frankie*. She co-founded the Women's Media Center with Gloria Steinem and Robin Morgan in 2005, and launched a climate political action committee in 2022.

Why Jane Is Called a Genius

Fonda's claim rests on two distinct things, and they should be separated rather than blurred together into general admiration.

The first is a genuine acting intelligence, and the evidence is unusually specific. Kael's assessment of *Klute* identifies the mechanism: economy. Fonda gets a great deal of information into very little visible effort, and she does it while refusing the actressy signals that tell an audience how to feel. Hilton Als has noted her willingness to alienate a viewer rather than please one — a strategic choice most stars cannot afford and which is the reason her best performances have not dated. Roger Ebert named the texture "nervous intensity"; Vincent Canby, watching her comedy, admitted being "surprised all over again every time I see her do comedy with the mixture of comic intelligence and abandon she shows." Two Best Actress Oscars from seven nominations, an Emmy, two BAFTAs and eight Golden Globes across six decades is not a fluke of casting.

The second is commercial invention, a different faculty. The home-fitness video did not exist as a category before 1982; Fonda identified an audience, a format and a distribution technology simultaneously, and the result outsold every other tape on the market and helped establish the machine it played on. That is real entrepreneurial insight, even allowing for the luck of arriving as the VCR did.

The honest counter-case is that neither faculty extended reliably to political judgement, which is the arena she has cared about most. The Hanoi photograph was not a smear; she sat on the gun, and her own verdict — a lapse of sanity — is harsher than most of her critics'. Fifteen years of retirement removed her from film during what should have been a mature period, and a good deal of her later work is comfortable star vehicle rather than anything demanding. What is unarguable is the durability: very few performers have been at the top of their profession in the 1970s and still setting terms in the 2020s.

Legacy

Fonda holds an honorary Palme d'Or (2007), the AFI Life Achievement Award (2014), a Golden Lion for lifetime achievement (2017), the Cecil B. DeMille Award (2021) and the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award (2025). She founded the Jane Fonda Center for Adolescent Reproductive Health at Emory in 2001 and disclosed her own history of rape and childhood sexual abuse in 2017, in terms that made the point structural rather than personal: "I've been raped, I've been sexually abused as a child and I've been fired because I wouldn't sleep with my boss." Her 1970 mugshot — raised fist, arrest on a drug charge that collapsed when the pills turned out to be vitamins — is now sold as merchandise to fund an adolescent health charity in Georgia. She has been, in sequence, a starlet, an Oscar-winning dramatic actress, a national villain, a fitness magnate, a billionaire's wife, a Netflix lead and a repeat arrestee. The through-line is not consistency. It is a refusal to stay finished.

Achievements

• Academy Award for Best Actress — 1979
• California Hall of Fame — 2008
• Golden Globe Awards
• Worked as film actor, writer and stage actor