Jane Fonda Biography

Two-time Academy Award-winning actress Jane Fonda has undergone nearly as many transformations throughout her career as a cat has lives, and each new phase of her life, however scandalous or controversial, has kept the general public fascinated. The daughter of film legend Henry Fonda (and sister of Peter) parlayed the family name into a modeling career followed rapidly by a movie debut in “Tall Story” (1960). Her title role in “Cat Ballou” (1965) confirmed her as a full-fledged Hollywood princess just as she was metamorphosing to the 1960s sex kitten embodied in decadent French director and then-husband Roger Vadim’s “Barbarella” (1968). Disturbed by her sexual exploitation, Fonda recreated herself as the cause-conscious champion of Black Panthers and Native Americans, and her visit to Hanoi in 1972 earned her the lasting enmity of the Right, who dubbed her with the moniker “Hanoi Jane.” Though she continued to advance a leftist agenda and second husband Tom Hayden’s political career, she simultaneously produced successful films like “Coming Home” (1978) and “9 to 5″ (1980) while segueing into her life as “Queen of the Exercise Video” when her workout tapes helped popularize aerobic exercise across America and raked in millions. When her marriage to Hayden collapsed along with her box-office prospects, Fonda turned to the brash media mogul Ted Turner who was there to embrace her to his protective breast, seemingly making her feel as secure as she had in her childhood. However, the union was ultimately revealed to be far less than idyllic than it appeared, and Fonda soon flew solo again and came full circle, returning before the cameras.

Born in New York City in 1937, Jane Seymour Fonda’s childhood required staying in her pathologically cold father’s good graces, where having a perfect body and being “on the winning team” were of primary importance, while emotional expression was met with disgust and disdain. When she was 12, her 42-year-old mother, socialite Frances Seymour Brokaw, slashed her own throat with a razor—the actress was told that she’d died of heart failure but learned the truth months later while leafing through a movie magazine in art class. A year later, she began seriously hating her own body, resulting in bulimia and an addiction to Dexedrine that persisted well into Fonda’s forties. She was sent to the Emma Willard boarding school in Troy, N.Y., then attended Vassar College, but she dropped out and convinced her father to send her to Paris to study painting. Returning to the States, despite initially resisting entry into her legendary father’s profession, she was prompted by Joshua Logan to appear with her father in the 1954 Omaha Community Theatre production of “The Country Girl” and she found meaning in the acting classes she took with Lee Strasberg. In 1959, she began her film career by working on Logan’s movie version of the Broadway play “Tall Story” (1960), costarring Anthony Perkins; the same year the film was released she was nominated for Broadway’s 1960 Tony Award as Best Supporting or Featured Actress (Dramatic) for “There Was a Little Girl.” Early films like George Cukor’s “The Chapman Report” (1962) hinted at her promise, and she was quickly cast in several more films.

In 1963, Fonda returned to France to work on a film with director René Clément, “Les Félins” (1964) meeting and felling in love with Vadim, (fresh from relationships with Catherine Deneuve and Brigitte Bardot), a Parisian style leftist intellectual horrified by anything that smacked of the bourgeois who encouraged Fonda—whom he married in 1965—to rid herself of supposedly outmoded qualities like sexual jealousy by introducing her to polygamous encounters and remaking her image into the type of “sex kitten” that populated his risqué films. Meanwhile, Fonda showed glimpses of maturity in Arthur Penn’s “The Chase” (1966) and added to her range in movies like Otto Preminger’s “Hurry Sundown” (1966) and Gene Saks’ adaptation of the Neil Simon play “Barefoot in the Park” (1967), opposite Robert Redford. However, it was not until she was truly independent of both her father and Vadim—who helmed her big-haired, pouty-lipped sex symbol turn in the sci-fi satire and 60s pop culture artifact “Barbarella”—that she became more resolute and aggressive and, consequently, one of the best young actresses around.

As a hard-as-nails babe in Sydney Pollack’s “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” (1969), Fonda helped make the compelling tale of a Depression era dance marathon an existential allegory of life with a riveting, unblinkingly fierce nihilism. She earned her first Best Actress Oscar nomination for the role. The shift in her acting direction coincided with a radical new socio-political phase in her personal life. Reports of the Vietnam War, unfiltered through U.S. media, shocked her social circle in France, and her mentor Simone Signoret brought Fonda to a Paris antiwar rally to hear Jean-Paul Sartre and others. The actress, who was looking for an escape from the “permissive, indolent life” she led with her soon-to-collapse union with Vadim, threw herself into the anti-war movement (as well as supporting Native American causes and the Black Panther Party), cut her hair into a trendsetting brown shag and redirected her acting energies: In Alan J Pakula’s “Klute” (1971), Fonda really came into her own, a much-matured actress building on her previous role and winning a Best Actress Oscar for a complex study of an emotionally-unstable professional prostitute. Fonda for the first time evinced a star’s greatness on screen, but despite subsequent triumphs, she would never top her superb performance as Bree Daniels in “Klute.”

In 1970, she took her revolutionary role to heart, going on the road, visiting GI coffeehouses, marching and speaking, which prompted the FBI to closely monitor her. (she was arrested on drug charges that were later dropped). She met antiwar activist Tom Hayden, then a counter culture lightning rod for political change—they subsequently married in 1973 just days after her divorce from Vadim. Meanwhile, in 1972, Fonda made her infamous journey to Hanoi, which perhaps has engraved her in the American consciousness more deeply than any of her films. Carried away by singing a song she had memorized for the Vietnamese people, Fonda found herself in the seat of a North Vietnamese antiaircraft gun, where she was snapped in a highly publicized photograph—the image caused a furor in the U.S., and prompted an ill will toward the actress among Vietnam veterans and supporters of the war that would linger and haunt the actress for decades to come.

Following her revolutionary interlude, during which she dabbled in writing, directing and for the first time producing, Fonda returned to mainstream success with her portrayal of Lillian Hellman that was the firm but anxious center of the biopic “Julia” (1976). Although she clearly admired and identified with the searching, feisty, liberal role she was playing, she managed to alienate Hellman with the left-handed compliment that the writer was a homely woman who carried herself like Marilyn Monroe. “California Suite” (1978) teamed her with Alan Alda, another scion of a showbiz family, and allowed the actress to show off her new exercise-fit body as a precursor to her reign as workout guru. “Coming Home” (also 1978), the first feature from her production company IPC, offered powerful insight into the effect of the Vietnam War on people at home and won her a second Best Actress Oscar. IPC would produce “The China Syndrome” (1979), fortuitously released at a time when it could cash in on the hysteria over a nuclear power plant accident at Three Mile Island and “9 to 5″ (1981), a zany comedy about the conditions faced by working women co-starring Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton that grossed more than $100 million, along with a short-lived ABC sit-com of the same name that Fonda executive produced and guest starred on. She finally got the chance to act with her father for the first time on film in “On Golden Pond” (also 1981), which Henry Fonda a long overdue Best Actor Oscar (Jane was nominated as Best Supporting Actress) and enabled dad and daughter to work out some things in their relationship for posterity, leaving nary a dry eye on the set or in the house. The senior Fonda died shortly after collecting his trophy.

Of Fonda’s subsequent films of that era, only “The Morning After” (1986) met with the kind of response to which she had grown accustomed, earning her another Best Actress Oscar nomination. “Rollover” (1981), with Alan J. Pakula as director, was pretentious and incomprehensible while “Agnes of God” (1985) did not translate well from stage to screen. Away from the cineplex, she and Hayden bought a 200-acre ranch north of Santa Barbara, where they established a performing arts camp for children of all backgrounds that operated from 1977 to 1991. In 1979, with partner Leni Cazden, she began creating the workouts and subsequent books and videos that became the craze known worldwide as “doing Jane”—the $17 million in proceeds from her business funded Hayden’s political campaigns and the statewide nonprofit Campaign for Economic Democracy. However, their seemingly tight-knit and dutiful union eventually fell into disarray, and the couple split in 1988.

Her next film, “Old Gringo” (1989), despite excellent performances from Fonda, Gregory Peck and Jimmy Smits, failed to find an audience. Even working with the esteemed Robert De Niro in the romantic drama “Stanley & Iris” (1991) proved disappointing—as much for its artistic quality as for the fact it would be Fonda’s final feature for nearly fifteen years. In 1991, charmed by the puffing, strutting Turner’s outspoken brashness and his love of nature, Fonda married the Atlanta-based media mogul on her 54th birthday and subsequently announced her retirement from film acting, distancing herself from the Hollywood community. She took over the Turner Foundation and worked tirelessly on issues of population control, children’s health, adolescent reproductive health and sexuality, including launching the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention. For her 60th birthday, Turner gave his wife a $10-million charitable foundation. Although she later revealed that Turner was unfaithful only a month into the marriage, on the surface they seemed a happy, committed couple for nearly a decade before their split in 2000, and Fonda’s Hollywood connection dwindled to a few high-profile, dressed-to-the-nines visits on Turner’s arm to major events like the Academy Awards.

After an all-too lengthy absence from the big screen, Fonda made a welcome return in the comedy “Monster-In-Law” (2005) in a hilarious, vanity-free tour-de-force performance as an aggressive, much-married, just-fired broadcast journalist whose mental breakdown prompts her to take malicious action to prevent her only son’s impending marriage to a sweet-natured temp (Jennifer Lopez). She also released a well-timed memoir, My Life So Far, in which she frankly detailed her contentious relationship with her father, her eating disorders and addictions, and her lifelong propensity to reshape herself to suit the men in her life. She also candidly made apologies for her Hanoi excursion, writing “I realize that it is not just a U.S. citizen laughing and clapping on a [North] Vietnamese antiaircraft gun: I am Henry Fonda’s privileged daughter who appears to be thumbing my nose at the country that has provided me these privileges.” She was, however, still unable to shake the Hanoi Jane moniker. Meanwhile, she turned in another sassy performance with “Georgia Rule” (2007), playing Georgia, the hard-nosed grandmother of an uncontrollable teenager (Lindsay Lohan) sent by her mother (Felicity Huffman) to her Iowa farm to be instilled with some down-home discipline, thanks to Georgia’s unbreakable and nonnegotiable rules. But while her feisty and carefree granddaughter stands to learn a thing or two, she unearths buried family secrets that will—regardless of what happens—bring all three women closer together.