On the night of April 10, 1972, Jane Fonda walked to the podium at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles, clutching the Academy Award for Best Actress, and said the words that would follow her for the rest of her life: “There’s a great deal to say and I’m not going to say it tonight.”
She was thirty-four years old, wearing the shag haircut that half the women in America were already copying, and she had just won for playing a New York call girl named Bree Daniels — a woman who sells her body by night, dreams of being an actress by day, and narrates her own unraveling to a psychiatrist while a detective with haunted eyes watches from the shadows. Three years earlier, Jane Fonda had been Barbarella, the zero-gravity sex kitten in a silver bikini. Now she was the most serious actress of her generation. The distance between those two women was the story of Klute — and the story of how Jane Fonda became Jane Fonda.
The Girl Hollywood Didn’t Know What to Do With
To understand what Klute meant, you have to understand what Jane Fonda was before it. She was born in 1937, the daughter of Henry Fonda — American nobility, the moral conscience of The Grapes of Wrath and 12 Angry Men — and for the first decade of her film career, Hollywood treated her like a beautiful problem it couldn’t solve.
She studied with Lee Strasberg. She earned a Tony nomination on Broadway in 1960. She made her film debut in Tall Story the same year. And then the sixties did what the sixties did to beautiful young actresses: it turned her into decoration. She married the French director Roger Vadim in 1965, and Vadim — the man who had manufactured Brigitte Bardot — set about manufacturing his wife. The result was Barbarella in 1968, a psychedelic space romp in which Fonda spent most of the running time undressing in zero gravity. It made her famous and it made her furious.
But something was already shifting. In 1969, she played Gloria Beatty in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, Sydney Pollack’s merciless drama about Depression-era dance marathons — a woman so hollowed out by despair that she begs to be put down like a lame horse. Fonda was shattering in it. The Academy noticed: her first Oscar nomination, for Best Actress. She lost to Maggie Smith, but the message was sent. The sex kitten had claws, and she intended to use them.
Pakula’s Paranoia
Enter Alan J. Pakula. The director-producer, fresh off The Sterile Cuckoo, was developing a thriller from a screenplay by Andy and Dave Lewis — two brothers whose script would go on to earn an Oscar nomination of its own. The premise was lean and mean: John Klute, a taciturn private detective from a small Pennsylvania town played by Donald Sutherland, travels to New York City to investigate the disappearance of a businessman named Tom Gruneman. His only lead is Bree Daniels, a high-priced call girl who once received Gruneman’s obscene letters and recorded tapes — and who may be the next target of whoever is watching her.
Klute would become the first film in what critics later called Pakula’s “paranoia trilogy,” followed by The Parallax View (1974) and All the President’s Men (1976). But at the time, it was simply a dangerous little movie about dangerous people — and Pakula needed an actress who could make Bree Daniels more than a victim or a vamp. He needed someone who could play a woman performing confidence she doesn’t feel, in a city that devours women like her.
He needed Jane Fonda.
Becoming Bree Daniels
What Fonda did with Bree Daniels remains one of the great acting transformations of the seventies. Bree is introduced in the film’s framing device: she is talking to her psychiatrist, Dr. Fulton, played with quiet gravity by Vivian Nathan. These therapy scenes run through the whole picture like a spine, and they are Fonda’s masterstroke. Watch her in them — the way Bree narrates her own life with a brittle, defiant wit, analyzing herself even as she refuses to change. “I guess I just can’t face the idea of being like everybody else,” she tells the doctor, and Fonda delivers it with a laugh that doesn’t reach her eyes.
The genius of the performance is its layering. Bree is an actress manqué — she tells everyone she’s really an actress, that the call-girl work is temporary — and Fonda plays her as a woman who is always performing, even for herself. With her johns, she’s in control, sharp-tongued, almost cruel. Alone in her apartment, listening to the obscene tape recordings that may hold the key to Gruneman’s disappearance, she’s terrified. With Klute, she’s something else entirely: furious at being watched, then furious at herself for wanting to be seen.
Fonda has said in later years that Bree Daniels remains one of her favorite roles, and you can see why. The part demanded everything: nudity without exploitation, vulnerability without self-pity, intelligence without warmth. She found the character’s center in Bree’s contradiction — a woman who chose the oldest profession as a declaration of independence and discovered it was another kind of cage.
Around her, Pakula and his cinematographer Gordon Willis — already earning his nickname “the prince of darkness” — built a New York of shadows and surveillance. Willis shoots Bree’s apartment like a trap closing. The film’s great visual motif is watching itself: Klute watching Bree through windows, Bree listening to tapes, all of them caught in a web of recorded voices. The famous sequence in which Bree plays back the tape, trying to identify the voice of her tormentor, is pure dread — and Fonda’s face, lit by nothing but fear and a desk lamp, carries the whole scene.
And then there’s the ending, which divided audiences then and still does now. Klute asks Bree to leave the city with him. She hesitates. The film’s final image — Bree in Klute’s small-town house, looking out at a life she isn’t sure she wants — refuses to tell us whether she stays or goes. Fonda plays that ambiguity perfectly: a woman who has survived by never depending on anyone, facing the terrifying prospect of depending on someone.
Love, Politics, and the FTA Tour
Off screen, Klute was tangled up with the other great drama of Fonda’s life. During the shoot, she began a relationship with her co-star Donald Sutherland — the tall, craggy Canadian whose hangdog detective was the perfect foil for her electric Bree. The two were kindred spirits, both radicalized by the Vietnam War, and together they created the FTA tour in 1971 — “FTA” standing, in GI slang, for “Fuck The Army.”
The FTA show was a traveling antiwar revue that played coffeehouses and venues near American military bases, offering soldiers an alternative to Bob Hope’s pro-war USO tours. Fonda and Sutherland performed alongside a troupe of actors and musicians, and the documentary F.T.A. (1972) captured the tour’s raucous, defiant spirit. It was during this period — filming Klute by day, organizing against the war by night — that Fonda’s two identities, the actress and the activist, fused permanently. Bree Daniels, the woman who refuses to be owned, was not so far from Jane Fonda herself.
There was also the hair. Fonda’s shag haircut in Klute — feathered, tousled, impossibly cool — became a national sensation. Salons across America reported women walking in with magazine photos of Bree Daniels, asking for “the Jane Fonda.” It was the rare movie haircut that escaped the screen and entered the culture, and it told you something about the performance: women didn’t just admire Bree, they wanted to be her — the independence, the edge, the refusal to apologize.
The Speech She Didn’t Give
By the time Oscar night arrived on April 10, 1972, Fonda was the most politically controversial movie star in America. Her antiwar activism had made her a hero to the left and a villain to much of the country. There was genuine suspense about what she would say if she won — would she turn the podium into a protest stage?
She didn’t. She kept it to a single, loaded sentence: “There’s a great deal to say and I’m not going to say it tonight.” It was restraint as statement — everyone in that room knew exactly what she wasn’t saying, and the line became instantly famous. The win itself was the statement. In three years, Jane Fonda had gone from Barbarella to the Academy Award for Best Actress. No one would ever again mistake her for decoration.
The Legacy of Bree
More than fifty years later, Klute holds up as one of the great American thrillers — and Bree Daniels holds up as one of the great screen creations. The film essentially invented the template for the modern neo-noir heroine: the sex worker as the smartest person in the room, the woman the camera watches who watches right back. You can see Bree’s DNA in everything from Dressed to Kill to The Long Goodbye‘s world-weary women to the prestige-TV antiheroines of our own era.
For Fonda, the role was the hinge of her career. Before Bree, she was Henry Fonda’s daughter, Roger Vadim’s wife, Hollywood’s beautiful problem. After Bree, she was Jane Fonda — the actress who would go on to win a second Oscar for Coming Home, to anchor The China Syndrome and 9 to 5 and On Golden Pond, to become the defining screen presence of her generation. She has said many times that Bree is the role she loves most, the one she feels closest to. It’s easy to see why. In Bree Daniels, Jane Fonda played a woman fighting to be free — and in playing her, she became free herself.
Bree Daniels endures — in the shadows of Gordon Willis’s New York, in the crackle of a tape recorder, in the face of a woman who decided, finally, to stop performing and start living. “There’s a great deal to say,” Jane Fonda told the Academy that night. With Bree Daniels, she had already said it.