Home \ Signature Roles \ The China Syndrome (1979) — Jane Fonda
JANE FONDA · 1979 · SIGNATURE ROLES
Kimberly Wells is a television reporter assigned to fluff pieces who stumbles onto a near-meltdown at a nuclear power plant — and discovers that the plant’s owners would rather discredit her than fix it.
Kimberly Wells is a television reporter assigned to fluff pieces who stumbles onto a near-meltdown at a nuclear power plant — and discovers that the plant’s owners would rather discredit her than fix it. Jane Fonda plays Kimberly as a professional fighting to be taken seriously, in a newsroom and an industry that would rather she smiled.
The film opened on March 16, 1979. Twelve days later, the Three Mile Island accident made its fiction terrifyingly real, and The China Syndrome became not just a hit but a cultural flashpoint, debated in Congress and on the evening news. Fonda, who also produced the film, had made a thriller about corporate power and public safety; reality supplied the ending she could not have written.
