Jane Fonda

• Back to Cinema
• History of Cinema
• Best films of all time
• Links to other sites

The daughter of one of Hollywood's most revered actors, she grew up with children who had parents in the entertainment business and attended an exclusive all-girls high school. She created a whole new kind of "film star", one who was very much involved in the political scene. She started out as an innocent and romantic ingenue, like many female stars before her, in lightweight comedies like Joshua Logan's Tall Story (1960) George Roy Hill's Period of Adjustment (1962), and Peter Tewksbury's Sunday in New York (1963), and matured as an actress in more sophisticated comedies like Elliot Silverstein's Cat Ballou (1965) and Gene Saks' Barefoot in the Park (1967) and especially Arthur Penn's The Chase (1966), written by Lillian Hellman, next to Marlon Brando and Robert Redford. At that point she pivoted towards the model of the "swinging" girl of the early 1960s, moved to France and joined the sexual revolution. She had already starred in Rene' Clement's Joy House (1964) and then began the collaboration with Roger Vadim that resulted in La Ronde/ Circle of Love (1964), yet another adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde, La Curee/ The Game Is Over (1966) and Barbarella (1968) and that established her as one of Europe's most popular sex kittens. When the magazine Newsweek published a story about sex and nudity in cinema (“Anything Goes - The Permissive Society", November 1967) it picked the photo of a scantily dressed Jane Fonda for the cover. Fonda married Roger Vadim, who had just loved and then left Brigitte Bardot and Catherine Deneuve, and they moved to California where Fonda played far more dramatic roles, notably the desperate loner of Sydney Pollack's They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969) and the call girl of Alan Pakula's Klute (1971). In 1969 her life was changed by the Charles Manson’s mass murder of her friend Roman Polanski's wife and others. Influenced by Marlon Brando, she decided she had to enter the political agon of the time. She famously visited North Vietnam in 1972, a trip for which she gained the attribute “Hanoi Jane” and that represented the nadir of her popular appeal. She was frequently booed during her public appearances and countless trucks bore stickers like "I am not Fonda Jane". In 1973 she married the political activist Tom Hayden, cofounder of Students for a Democratic Society and one of the "Chicago seven" who had been arrested in 1968 for inciting riots in the city. She became an antiwar activist and a leftist militant, turning her private life into a movie itself. Her roles became more intellectual for auteur-directed films like Joseph Losey's A Doll's House (1973), an adaptation of Ibsen's tragedy, Fred Zinnemann's Julia (1977) and Hal Ashby's Coming Home (1978), about Vietnam veterans. She played the rancher in Alan Pakula's western Comes a Horseman (1978), and the television reporters of James Bridges' The China Syndrome (1979) and of Sydney Pollack's The Electric Horseman (1979). In the 1980s she still gave standout performances in Colin Higgins' 9 to 5 (1980), Mark Rydell's On Golden Pond (1981), Alan Pakula's Rollover (1981), Norman Jewison's Agnes of God (1985) and Sidney Lumet’s The Morning After (1986).