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JANE FONDA
Jane Fonda has had at least three careers, and each one would have been enough.
Jane Fonda has had at least three careers, and each one would have been enough. First she was a movie star of the 1960s and 1970s, winning two Academy Awards. Then she became one of America’s most visible activists, a role that cost her dearly and that she has never disowned. Then she became a fitness pioneer, a television star, and, in her eighties, a climate activist arrested on the steps of the Capitol. Few performers have reinvented themselves so often, or so publicly, and fewer still have done it while remaining, unmistakably, themselves.
Jane Seymour Fonda was born on December 21, 1937, in New York City, the daughter of actor Henry Fonda and socialite Frances Ford Seymour. Her mother died by suicide when Jane was twelve, a loss she has spoken about with painful honesty in later years. She studied at Vassar College and then at the Actors Studio under Lee Strasberg, and her early film career — Tall Story (1960), Period of Adjustment (1962), Cat Ballou (1965), Barbarella (1968) — cast her largely as a light comedienne and sex symbol, a box she found increasingly confining.
The 1970s changed that. In They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969) she played Gloria, a marathon dancer in Depression-era California whose exhaustion curdles into despair, earning her first Academy Award nomination. In Klute (1971) she played Bree Daniels, a New York call girl who becomes the target of a killer and the reluctant witness of a detective; the performance — wary, funny, sexually frank, and finally terrified — won her the Academy Award for Best Actress and proved she was one of the finest dramatic actors of her generation.
Her activism in the same period — against the Vietnam War, for civil rights, for Native American rights — made her a hero to many and a villain to others. Her 1972 visit to North Vietnam, and a photograph of her seated on an anti-aircraft gun, earned her the nickname “Hanoi Jane” and a backlash that followed her for decades, including boycotts and, by her own account, years of professional damage. She has apologized repeatedly for the photograph while standing by her opposition to the war, a distinction her critics have often refused to grant her.
She returned to the top of her profession in the late 1970s with a run of hits: Fun with Dick and Jane (1977), a comedy about a couple turning to robbery after unemployment; Julia (1977), in which she played Lillian Hellman opposite Vanessa Redgrave’s anti-fascist title character; Coming Home (1978), in which she played Sally Hyde, a woman whose husband is fighting in Vietnam and who falls for a paralyzed veteran, winning her second Academy Award for Best Actress; and The China Syndrome (1979), a thriller about a nuclear accident that opened twelve days before the real Three Mile Island accident and became a cultural event.
In 1980 she appeared with her father in On Golden Pond, a film about an aging couple and their estranged daughter; Henry Fonda won his only competitive Academy Award for it, and Jane won nothing that night but later called the film her gift to him. He died the following year. In the 1980s she built a second empire with her workout videos — Jane Fonda’s Workout (1982) became the best-selling home video of its time — and then, after marrying media mogul Ted Turner in 1991, she largely retired from acting for fifteen years.
Her third act has been as remarkable as the first two: a return to film with Monster-in-Law (2005), the Netflix series Grace and Frankie (2015–2022) opposite Lily Tomlin, and, from 2019, weekly climate protests in Washington, D.C. — “Fire Drill Fridays” — at which she was arrested multiple times, cheerfully, in her eighties. She has been married three times, has three children, and has written candidly about her eating disorder, her marriages, and her search for a self apart from her father’s shadow.
Fonda’s legacy is complicated, and she knows it. She is an actor of great range, an activist of real consequence, and a woman who has lived her contradictions in public for sixty years. The through-line is a refusal to stay in the box she was given — whether that box was “sex symbol,” “movie star,” or “retired legend.” She kept opening new ones, and walking out of them, on her own terms.
The 1980s added further range and further risk. In The Morning After (1986) she played an alcoholic actress who wakes beside a murdered man, earning another Academy Award nomination for a performance of frayed, funny desperation. In Stanley & Iris (1990) she played a factory worker teaching a fellow worker to read, opposite Robert De Niro — a quiet, working-class love story that showed how far she had traveled from the glamour roles of her youth. She received the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award in 2014 and the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2021, honors that recognized a career spanning six decades and several reinventions.
Her later screen work kept that breadth: the ensemble comedy Book Club (2018), in which four friends’ lives are upended by Fifty Shades of Grey; 80 for Brady (2023), in which she and three fellow legends chase a Super Bowl; and a voice role in the animated Luck (2022). Through all of it, the activism never stopped — for women’s rights, for Native American rights, and, in her eighties, for the climate, with the same willingness to be arrested for a cause that had marked her youth. The through-line of her life is not any single role. It is the decision, made again and again, to keep becoming someone new.