Jane Fonda

• 1. Introduction

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  Jane Fonda sat on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun during a 1972 visit to Hanoi, and a photograph of that moment outraged a large number of Americans. It earned her a nickname that has followed her for decades: Hanoi Jane. For many people, that single image is the whole story. Yet it sits inside a career that spanned seven decades of film and television, and inside a life of constant reinvention. She has been a model, a stage actress, a fitness pioneer, a producer, an author and a protester. How did the daughter of a famous actor become one of the most acclaimed actresses of her generation? Why did she risk that standing for causes that angered so many people? And what does it take to keep returning after the public thinks it has already decided who you are?

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• 2. A Famous Name

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  On the 21st of December 1937, Jane Seymour Fonda was born by caesarean section at Doctors Hospital in Yorkville, Manhattan. Her mother, Frances Ford Seymour, was a Canadian-born socialite. Her father was the American actor Henry Fonda. According to him, the Fonda surname came from an Italian ancestor who moved to the Netherlands in the 1500s. That family took up Dutch given names, and its first member to reach New York arrived in 1650. Jane was named for Jane Seymour, the third wife of Henry VIII and a distant relative on her mother's side. Fonda said that until fourth grade she was called "Lady," as in Lady Jane. Her brother Peter Fonda also became an actor, and her maternal half-sister, Frances de Villers Brokaw, was known as "Pan."

  In 1950, when Fonda was 12, her mother died by suicide while being treated at Craig House psychiatric hospital in Beacon, New York. In 2014, Fonda revealed that her mother had been sexually abused repeatedly from as young as eight. She said this may have led to the suicide. Later in 1950, Henry Fonda married the socialite Susan Blanchard, who was 23 years younger than he was. That marriage ended in divorce.

  At 15, Jane taught dance at Fire Island Pines, New York. Her schooling took her through Greenwich Academy in Connecticut, the Emma Willard School in Troy, New York, and Vassar College in Poughkeepsie. Before she acted, she worked as a model and appeared twice on the cover of Vogue.

  A charity performance of The Country Girl at the Omaha Community Playhouse in 1954, with her father beside her, first sparked her interest in the arts. After leaving Vassar, she spent six months in Paris studying art. Back in the United States in 1958, she went to the Actors Studio and met Lee Strasberg. He told her she had real talent. She remembered that, apart from her father, who "had to say so," nobody had ever told her she was good at anything. "I went to bed thinking about acting. I woke up thinking about acting. It was like the roof had come off my life!" Her acting debut, in the 1960 Broadway play There Was a Little Girl, would earn her a Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actress in a Play.

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• 3. Breaking Through

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  Tall Story, a 1960 romantic comedy, gave Fonda her screen debut, as a college cheerleader chasing a basketball star played by Anthony Perkins. She was reprising a Broadway role. For the rest of the decade she averaged almost two movies a year. In 1962 she played a prostitute in Walk on the Wild Side and won a Golden Globe for Most Promising Newcomer. Sunday in New York followed in 1963, and Newsday called her "the loveliest and most gifted of all our new young actresses." Not everyone agreed. That same year, the Harvard Lampoon named her "Year's Worst Actress" for The Chapman Report.

  France hosted her next two pictures, Joy House and Circle of Love, both from 1964. In the second, Fonda became one of the first American film stars to appear nude in a foreign movie. She was offered the coveted role of Lara in Doctor Zhivago and turned it down, because she did not want to spend nine months on location.

  Cat Ballou, in 1965, made her a bankable star. She played a schoolmarm who becomes an outlaw in this comedy Western. The film earned five Oscar nominations, with Lee Marvin winning best actor, and it ranked among the year's top ten at the box office.

  The Chase, in 1966, paired her with Robert Redford for the first time, alongside the two-time Oscar winner Marlon Brando. Variety said she "makes the most of the biggest female role." She then returned to France for The Game Is Over, often described as her sexiest film. Paparazzi shots taken on its set appeared in the August 1966 issue of Playboy, and Fonda sued the magazine immediately for publishing them without her consent. Comedies came next, including Any Wednesday in 1966 and Barefoot in the Park in 1967, again with Redford. In 1968 she took the title role in the science fiction spoof Barbarella, which established her as a sex symbol.

  The tragedy They Shoot Horses, Don't They? in 1969 changed that image. Variety said her performance gave the film a personal focus and an emotionally gripping power. Pauline Kael noted in The New Yorker that after years as a charming, witty "nudie cutie," Fonda had finally been given an archetypal character and went all the way with it. Kael added: "Fonda stands a good chance of personifying American tensions and dominating our movies in the seventies as Bette Davis did in the thirties." The role brought Fonda the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress and her first Academy Award nomination. By the end of the decade she was so selective that she turned down lead roles in Rosemary's Baby and Bonnie and Clyde.

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• 4. Oscar Years

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  Fonda won her first Academy Award for Best Actress for the 1971 thriller Klute, directed by Alan J. Pakula. She played Bree Daniels, a high-priced call girl. Before shooting, she interviewed several prostitutes and madams. Years later she said she had found "a marriage, a melding of souls between this character and me." Critics were dazzled. Kael's verdict was blunt: "There isn't another young dramatic actress in American films who can touch her." Roger Ebert praised her "nervous intensity" and suggested the film should have been titled Bree.

  The 1971-72 awards season belonged to her. Besides the Oscar, she collected her first Golden Globe for best actress in a drama, her first National Society of Film Critics Award, and a second New York Film Critics Circle Award. The writer Hilton Als argued that her work from They Shoot Horses, Don't They? onward heralded a new kind of acting. For the first time, he said, she was willing to alienate viewers rather than win them over.

  A Doll's House, in 1973, cast her as Nora Helmer. Some critics felt she was miscast, yet The New York Times recommended the film for her performance and said she was "one of our finest actresses." She also appeared in Steelyard Blues and, in 1976, The Blue Bird. No major hit arrived between Klute and 1977. Some people inferred from her interviews that her politics had cost her work, and she once said, "I can't say I was blacklisted, but I was greylisted." Her 2005 autobiography, My Life So Far, rejected that reading. She wrote that her career had "flourished with a vigor it had not previously enjoyed." In her telling, she simply acted less because activism gave her a new focus.

  That focus shaped her choices. She decided to make only films about important issues, and she turned down An Unmarried Woman because the part did not feel relevant. In 1972 she played a reporter opposite Yves Montand in Tout Va Bien, directed by Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin. The two directors then made Letter to Jane, in which they spent nearly an hour discussing a news photograph of her. Through her production company, IPC Films, she produced films that returned her to star status.

  Fun with Dick and Jane, in 1977, is generally considered her comeback. Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote that he was surprised all over again each time he saw her mix comic intelligence with abandon. The same year she played the playwright Lillian Hellman in Julia. That role brought her first BAFTA Award for Best Actress, a second Golden Globe and her third Oscar nomination.

  In 1978 she won her second Best Actress Oscar for Coming Home. She played Sally Hyde, a conflicted adulteress, in the story of a disabled Vietnam War veteran struggling to re-enter civilian life. Ebert called Sally "the kind of character you somehow wouldn't expect the outspoken, intelligent Fonda to play." She also won a third Golden Globe, her second in a row.

  The China Syndrome, in 1979, brought a second BAFTA. Fonda played an ambitious television news reporter in a story about a cover-up at a nuclear power plant, opposite Jack Lemmon and Michael Douglas, then in one of his early roles. Canby wrote, "She keeps getting better and better." The Electric Horseman, with Redford, grossed nearly $62 million domestically, and by the late 1970s Motion Picture Herald ranked her Hollywood's most bankable actress.

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• 5. Workout and Retirement

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  A fractured ankle during the filming of The China Syndrome forced Fonda off the set, and the production had to shoot around her scenes. She had long taken ballet classes to stay fit. To recover, she began aerobics and strengthening exercises under the direction of Leni Cazden. The Leni Workout became the Jane Fonda Workout, and a second career began. It is considered one of the influences that started the fitness craze among baby boomers, who were then approaching middle age.

  In 1982 she released her first exercise video, Jane Fonda's Workout, inspired by her best-selling Jane Fonda's Workout Book. It became the highest-selling home video of the following years, passing a million copies. Many people bought the then-new VCR just to follow along at home. Sidney Galanty directed the videos, producing the first and eleven more. Across the whole series, sales reached 17 million copies, more than any other exercise series. She also released five workout books and thirteen audio programs through 1995. After a fifteen-year pause, she returned in 2010 with two new DVDs aimed at an older audience. The earnings had a political purpose. She marketed the videos and books to fund the Campaign for Economic Democracy, a California lobbying organization she founded with Tom Hayden in 1978.

  On the 3rd of May 1983, Fonda signed a non-exclusive agreement with Columbia Pictures. Under it, she would star in or produce projects through her own company, Jayne Development Corporation, with offices at The Burbank Studios. On the 25th of June 1985, she renamed the company Fonda Films, because she felt the original name sounded like a real estate company.

  Meanwhile, 9 to 5, in 1980, paired her with Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton. It was the second highest-grossing release of its year. Fonda had long hoped that working with her father might ease their strained relationship. She bought the screen rights to the play On Golden Pond for the two of them. The father-daughter rift on screen closely echoed the real one. The Fondas became the first father-daughter pair to earn Oscar nominations for the same film, and Jane received her first Best Supporting Actress nomination. Katharine Hepburn also starred. Henry won his only Best Actor Oscar, and Jane accepted it for him because he was too ill to leave home. He died five months later. Each of these two films grossed over $100 million domestically.

  Her 1980s work ranged widely. She won an Emmy for playing a Kentucky mountain woman in The Dollmaker in 1984 and played Dr. Martha Livingston in Agnes of God in 1985. In The Morning After, in 1986, she played an alcoholic actress who is a murder suspect. She modeled the character on the starlet Gail Russell, who was found dead in her apartment at 36, among empty liquor bottles. The performance earned another Best Actress nomination. Old Gringo closed the decade.

  Stanley & Iris, in 1990, matched her with Robert De Niro. Audiences stayed away. Canby still praised her performance as the widowed Iris, noting that beneath Iris's frumpy clothes was a body that had become a multi-million-dollar industry. It was her last film for fifteen years. In 1991, after three decades in film, she retired from the screen. On the 21st of December 1991, she married the cable television tycoon Ted Turner at a ranch near Capps, Florida, about 20 miles east of Tallahassee.

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• 6. Making of an Activist

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  Visits to France in the 1960s brought Fonda into contact with leftist French intellectuals who opposed war. She later called the experience "small-c communism." Her activism in that decade supported the Civil Rights Movement and opposed the Vietnam War. In 1969, she joined other celebrities in backing the Occupation of Alcatraz Island by members of the American Indian Movement, an action meant to draw attention to broken treaty rights. In 1970 she went to Seattle to support Native Americans led by Bernie Whitebear, who had occupied part of the grounds of Fort Lawton. They won, and the Daybreak Star Cultural Center was built in the city's Discovery Park.

  In the early 1970s she also backed Huey Newton and the Black Panthers. "Revolution is an act of love; we are the children of revolution, born to be rebels. It runs in our blood," she said.

  On the 4th of May 1970, Fonda spoke at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque about G.I. rights. Her talk ended in an uncomfortable silence. Then the Beat poet Gregory Corso staggered onstage, drunk, and demanded to know why she had said nothing about the Ohio National Guard's shooting of four students at Kent State. In her autobiography she recalled, "I was shocked by the news and felt like a fool." That same day, she joined a march on the home of university president Ferrel Heady. The marchers called themselves "They Shoot Students, Don't They?" after her new film.

  Later in 1970, Vietnam Veterans Against the War, known as VVAW, invited her to a rally in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. She offered to raise money for the group and was named Honorary National Coordinator. That fall she toured college campuses to raise funds. The New York Times called her a "major patron." Her lawsuit against Playboy helped too. In the settlement, the February 1971 issue carried a full-page ad supporting VVAW.

  In 1971, Fonda, Fred Gardner and Donald Sutherland formed the FTA tour, built as an answer to Bob Hope's USO tour. Fonda called it "political vaudeville." It visited military towns on the West Coast to start conversations with soldiers about their coming deployments to Vietnam. A film of those conversations, F.T.A., released in 1972, contains frank criticism of the war by servicemembers.

  On the 2nd of November 1970, authorities arrested Fonda at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport on suspicion of drug trafficking. She was returning from an antiwar speaking tour in Canada, and police seized small baggies of pills from her luggage. She insisted they were vitamins. Lab tests confirmed it, and the charges were dropped with little media attention. She alleged that the arresting officer said he acted on orders from the Nixon White House. Her mugshot, taken with a raised fist, became a widely published image. In September 2018 a giant billboard of it went up in Times Square to promote an HBO documentary.

  A 2013 revelation showed the government had been watching her far more closely. Fonda was one of roughly 1,600 Americans whose communications between 1967 and 1973 were monitored by the National Security Agency under Project MINARET. Some NSA officials later described the program as "disreputable if not downright illegal." Britain's Government Communications Headquarters also intercepted her communications, along with those of Tom Hayden.

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• 7. Road to Hanoi

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  Between 1965 and 1972, almost 300 Americans traveled to North Vietnam, mostly civil rights activists, teachers and pastors. They were routinely harassed when they came home. Fonda made the trip in July 1972, to see bomb damage to the dikes. After touring and photographing the dike systems, she said the United States had deliberately targeted the dikes along the Red River. Sweden's ambassador to Vietnam called the damage "methodic." The columnist Joseph Kraft, also touring North Vietnam, thought it incidental and said Hanoi was using it as propaganda. The Central Intelligence Agency wrote a secret report on the publicity and found "no concerted and intentional bombing of North Vietnam's vital dike system." The French geographer Yves Lacoste disagreed. His 1973 analysis concluded that the dikes in the eastern delta were intentionally targeted.

  The photograph overshadowed the argument. In her 2005 autobiography she wrote that she had been manipulated into sitting on the battery. In 2011, on her official website, she described her last day in Hanoi. She was exhausted and emotional after two weeks. Soldiers sang her a song about the day "Uncle Ho" declared independence in Ba Dinh Square, and she began to cry. In return she sang "Dậy mà đi," or "Get Up and Go," a song by anti-war South Vietnamese students, knowing she was "slaughtering it." Someone led her toward the gun, and she sat down, still laughing and applauding. She wrote that the Vietnamese may have planned it, but added, "The buck stops here." She called it "a two-minute lapse of sanity that will haunt me forever."

  On Hanoi Radio, Fonda made broadcasts throughout the two-week tour. She described villages, hospitals, schools and factories that had been bombed, and she denounced American military policy. She also met American prisoners of war and carried their messages home to their families. When the Nixon administration later publicized stories of torture of returning prisoners, she called those making such claims "hypocrites and liars and pawns." She told The New York Times in 1973 that she was sure there had been incidents of torture. But she said the claim that Vietnamese policy made it systematic was something she believed was "a lie."

  Rumors soon spread that prisoners had been tortured into meeting her. They circulated for decades on the Internet. Fonda denied them, and so did the named prisoners. Later interviews showed that the people named had never met her at all. In 1972 she helped fund and organize the Indochina Peace Campaign, which kept mobilizing antiwar activists until the United States withdrew from Vietnam in 1975.

  Resentment endured. A Naval Academy plebe ritual once involved shouting "Goodnight, Jane Fonda!" and the whole company answering with an insult. The academy has since prohibited the practice. In 2005, at a Kansas City book signing for My Life So Far, the Navy veteran Michael A. Smith spat chewing tobacco in her face. He called it "a debt of honor." He was arrested for disorderly conduct, and Fonda refused to press charges. In 2024, Los Angeles County planned a "Jane Fonda Day" for her environmental work on the 30th of April. The Vietnamese American community objected, because that date marks Black April, the day Saigon fell. The county moved it to the 8th of April.

  In a 1988 interview with Barbara Walters, Fonda apologized to veterans and their families for her thoughtlessness. "I will go to my grave regretting the photograph of me in an anti-aircraft gun," she said. On 60 Minutes on the 31st of March 2005, she called it a "betrayal" and "the largest lapse of judgment that I can even imagine." She drew a line, though. She said she would not apologize for her antiwar activism, or for the Hanoi Radio broadcasts, which she had asked the North Vietnamese to arrange. "Our government was lying to us and men were dying because of it," she said.

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• 8. A Second Act

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  Fonda divorced Ted Turner on the 22nd of May 2001, and the two stayed amicable. She called him "my favorite ex-husband." Her return to the screen came in 2005 with Monster-in-Law, a hit comedy opposite Jennifer Lopez. That same year Random House published My Life So Far, which divides her life into three acts of thirty years each. She wrote that the third act would be her most significant, partly because of her commitment to Christianity. The Washington Post called her a "beautiful bundle of contradictions."

  In 2009 she returned to Broadway for the first time since 1963, playing Katherine Brandt in 33 Variations. It earned her a Tony nomination. The New York Times critic Ben Brantley praised her "layered crispness." Television followed. She played the media CEO Leona Lansing in HBO's The Newsroom, and in The Butler she played Nancy Reagan despite their political differences. "I will not be disrespectful," she said. Then came Grace and Frankie, in which she and Lily Tomlin played aging women whose husbands reveal they are in love with each other. It premiered on the 8th of May 2015 and ended in 2022 after seven seasons. Book Club, in 2018, grossed $93.4 million against a $10 million budget, even though it opened the same day as Deadpool 2.

  Honors piled up. She received the Honorary Palme d'Or in 2007, the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2014, the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in 2017, the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2021 and the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award in 2025.

  Her causes grew alongside her roles. In 1984, Fonda and Barbra Streisand joined ten other women in the Los Angeles entertainment industry to found the Hollywood Women's Political Committee. It first set out to help Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro. It later helped elect a record number of women legislators in 1992, and it dissolved in 1997. Observers called it "the single most-powerful entertainment group" in politics. In 2005, with Robin Morgan and Gloria Steinem, she cofounded the Women's Media Center. She is also an honorary chairperson of V-Day, which works to stop violence against women. In 2001 she established the Jane Fonda Center for Adolescent Reproductive Health at Emory University in Atlanta. In a 2017 interview, she said she had been raped, sexually abused as a child and fired for refusing to sleep with her boss. She said she wanted victims to realize it was not their fault.

  In October 2019, Fonda was arrested at the United States Capitol on four consecutive Fridays, protesting climate change. Her fellow protesters included Sam Waterston, Ted Danson, Catherine Keener and Rosanna Arquette. In March 2022 she launched the Jane Fonda Climate PAC, aimed at ousting politicians who support the fossil fuel industry. In 2026 it was announced that she would star in the film adaptation of Virginia Evans' best-seller The Correspondent.

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