He rarely raised his voice, yet audiences listened to him more closely than to almost any other actor — Henry Fonda was Hollywood’s quiet conscience.
Henry Fonda was born in Nebraska in 1905 and grew up in Omaha. He began acting in community theatre and on Broadway, where his tall, lean presence and calm, direct manner made him a natural leading man. His stage success led him to Hollywood in the mid-1930s.
In the late 1930s and early 1940s he became a defining American screen actor. He played Abraham Lincoln in Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) and Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath (1940), a performance that earned him an Academy Award nomination and became a symbol of dignity in hard times. During the Second World War he served in the United States Navy, as the photograph above shows.
After the war he continued to play men of principle — Wyatt Earp in My Darling Clementine (1946), a juror holding out for justice in 12 Angry Men (1957), which he also produced — and, memorably, a villain in Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). His career lasted more than four decades, and it closed with On Golden Pond (1981), for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor.
Fonda died in 1982, remembered as an actor whose honesty on screen was his greatest gift, and whose quiet voice still speaks for an ideal of American decency.