Home \ Signature Roles \ Coming Home (1978) — Jane Fonda
JANE FONDA · 1978 · SIGNATURE ROLES
Sally Hyde’s husband is fighting in Vietnam; she volunteers at a veterans’ hospital and meets Luke Martin, a paralyzed former Marine played by Jon Voight, and falls in love with him.
Sally Hyde’s husband is fighting in Vietnam; she volunteers at a veterans’ hospital and meets Luke Martin, a paralyzed former Marine played by Jon Voight, and falls in love with him. Jane Fonda plays Sally’s transformation — from a proper officer’s wife to a woman who sees the war’s cost in human terms — with extraordinary tenderness.
The film arrived at the height of America’s reckoning with Vietnam, and its power comes from its refusal to simplify. Sally does not become a radical; she becomes a person who has looked at suffering and cannot unsee it. Fonda won her second Academy Award for Best Actress, and the film’s love story — between two people the war has broken in different ways — remains one of the most humane treatments of the subject ever filmed.
