The Full Biography
Jane Fonda. Actress. The daughter who made a monument’s silence into a second American life — pictures, a war, a leotard, and a clarity she did not always have at the time.
This is her story.
The image most people still carry is Barbarella, or a woman on a North Vietnamese gun, or a workout tape, or a woman at a climate march. What the still cannot show is Jane Seymour Fonda of New York, Henry’s daughter, Frances’s daughter, two Oscars, and a life that has had to hold Hanoi, Ted Turner, the tapes, and a woman still working in her eighties because the work is how she stays in the argument.
She was born on December 21, 1937, in New York. The household was a monument and a suicide. Henry Fonda was already the American idea of a decent man on a porch. Frances Ford Seymour, Jane’s mother, had been a socialite and a patient; she died by suicide in 1950, when Jane was twelve, at a sanitarium in Beacon, New York. Henry did not tell the children the cause. Jane has written the kitchen that followed: a famous father, a silence, a girl who learned to watch a room for the thing that would not be said. She went to Greenwich Academy and then Vassar. She modeled. She studied with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio because the family trade was acting and because acting was a way to put a body between herself and the porch. Joshua Logan, who had directed her father, put her in Tall Story (1960) opposite Anthony Perkins. She was twenty-two. She was already, in the stills, a Fonda. She was not yet a second life.
The first run was light and then it was not. Period of Adjustment (1962). Sunday in New York (1963). Cat Ballou (1965) opposite Lee Marvin, a comedy western that treated her as a joke the picture was in on. Barefoot in the Park (1967), from Neil Simon, with Robert Redford, is the apartment and the newlywed weather America wanted from Henry’s girl. Then Roger Vadim, whom she married in 1965, put her in Barbarella (1968). The still is a comic-book Venus in plastic. She has been wry about the object and finished with it. Vanessa Vadim was born in 1968. The marriage did not hold. The object did.
The door into the work that lasted was not the leotard and not the gun. It was a marathon dance.
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969), for Sydney Pollack, put her in a Depression contest as Gloria, a woman who has already decided the race is a cheat. It is a hard picture. The Academy nominated her. She did not yet have the statue. She had stopped being only Henry’s daughter in a Manhattan walk-up. Klute (1971), for Alan J. Pakula, opposite Donald Sutherland, brought the first Oscar. She is Bree Daniels, a call girl who is also a mind, a woman who talks to a therapist because the job is a performance she can no longer tell from a self. The haircut became a climate. The performance is the listening, not the hair. That is the first monument, and it is easy to lose under the civic weather that followed.
In July 1972 she went to Hanoi. She sat on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun. A photograph was made. She has said she was wrong to sit there; she has not said she was wrong to oppose the war. A complete life holds the apology and the opposition. “Hanoi Jane” is a weapon other people still fire. She has had to live next to the barrel.
She kept working inside the argument. The FTA tour — Free the Army, or Free the Actors, depending on the night — took her and Sutherland to coffeehouses near bases. Julia (1977), for Fred Zinnemann, opposite Vanessa Redgrave, is Lillian Hellman and a friend and a war of a different decade. Coming Home (1978), for Hal Ashby, opposite Jon Voight and Bruce Dern, brought the second Oscar. She is a Marine wife who falls in love with a paralyzed veteran. The picture is a war picture that stays in a California hospital and a bed. She had married Tom Hayden in 1973. Their son, Troy Garity, was born that year. Hayden was the political marriage: SDS, Chicago, California, a life in which the call sheet and the meeting were the same week. They divorced in 1990. The work from those years is the file, not a cleaned résumé: The China Syndrome (1979) with Jack Lemmon and Michael Douglas, a nuclear-plant thriller that arrived in theaters days before Three Mile Island and then looked like reporting; The Electric Horseman (1979) with Redford again; 9 to 5 (1980) with Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton, a secretarial revolt that became a standard; On Golden Pond (1981), opposite Henry and Katharine Hepburn, a daughter playing a daughter to a monument who was also her father. Henry won his Oscar on that picture. She was the one who had asked him to do it. The porch, for once, answered.
The 1980s tapes made her a second corporation. Jane Fonda’s Workout Book and the videocassettes that followed turned aerobics into a civic weather. Women bought the tape, cleared a rug, and learned a sequence from a woman who had already been Barbarella and Bree and a gun. The leotard is a feminist object some rooms still mock and some rooms still use. It was a firm, not a hobby. It paid. It also, she has said in the books, sat on a body she had already punished with bulimia and with the need to be the thinnest person in Henry’s doorway. She has been blunt about men, about the eating, about a father who was a porch and a silence. The books are the file, not a press kit. The Morning After (1986) brought another nomination. Then the pictures thinned while the tapes ran.
She married Ted Turner in 1991. That marriage was a climate of its own: Atlanta, ranches, CNN, a man who owned a network and a world Series and a temperament. It ended in 2001. She went back to a mark. Monster-in-Law (2005) with Jennifer Lopez was a hit she did not pretend was Klute. Georgia Rule (2007). HBO’s The Newsroom (2012–14), for Aaron Sorkin, as Leona Lansing, a network owner who could eat a room. Grace and Frankie (2015–22), with Tomlin again, a long sitcom about two women whose husbands have left them for each other, is the work of her eighties: a call time, a partner, a joke that does not sand the age. Book Club (2018) and its sequel. 80 for Brady (2023). She has not retired the argument to play only grandmothers. She has played grandmothers who still take a meeting.
I will go to my grave regretting the photograph of me in an anti-aircraft gun, which looks like I was trying to shoot at American planes. It hurt so many soldiers. It was the most horrible thing I could possibly have done.Jane Fonda, to Oprah Winfrey, 2000
The turn is Hanoi and then the tapes and then the books. A lot of 1970s radicals became consultants. She became an actress who would not retire the argument. She is more interesting for the corrections than for a cleaned résumé. The gun stays in the file. So does Klute. So does the leotard. All three are her. None is the whole throat.
Six things most people never knew
- Frances’s death and Henry’s silence are the first weather. The activism sits on a kitchen, not only on a theory.
- The first Oscar is Klute, not the war picture. 1971. A mind. The civic saint is a second weather.
- The Hanoi photograph is July 1972, a gun she has said she should not have sat on. The apology is real. The opposition to the war is also real. Both stay.
- The workout tapes were a firm, not a hobby. A second corporation. A feminist object some rooms still mock and some rooms still use.
- Turner is a marriage that was a climate of its own. It ended. She has been blunt. The books are the file, not a press kit.
- She is still working in her eighties. She did not become a wax radical. She became a woman who still takes a mark.
Vanessa and Troy have had to share a mother who is a gun and a tape and a statue. Friends from the sets of the last twenty years describe a professional who is prepared, political, and finished with a false note. The Fonda at a march is the same preparation without a call sheet.
The later years
Home, in the years after Turner, has been Los Angeles and a calendar that still has a call time on it. She did not become a woman who issues statements from a ranch. She became a woman who shows up: for Grace and Frankie across seven seasons, for a book-club comedy, for a Super Bowl joke with a football team of actresses in their eighties, for a part that requires the face as a woman who has already been several climates. The face is lined. She does not sand it. The work is how she stays in the argument, and the argument has moved from Vietnam to the body of the planet.
Fire Drill Fridays, beginning in 2019, put her on the Capitol steps and, more than once, in custody. Climate, she has said, is the war she has left. The arrests were not a brand refresh. They were a schedule: speak, sit, be booked, write the next one. She has used the fame the way she used the tapes — as a delivery system. Some rooms still want only the gun. Some rooms want only the leotard. She keeps offering the next meeting. What Can I Do?, the 2020 book, is a primer, not a memoir. The memoirs — My Life So Far and the ones that followed — had already done the kitchen, the eating, the marriages, the porch. The primer is a woman who has decided the last act is not a prestige part. It is a demand.
She has also, in these years, been a colleague. Tomlin is the long partner of the last sitcom. Redford remained a friend from the Simon years. The Fondas who are not Henry — Peter’s absence after 2019, Bridget’s private life, Troy’s own acting — sit around a table that is still a famous name. She has spoken about plastic surgery and about stopping it. She has spoken about cancer in the household of her own body and gone back to work. She has not made illness a farewell tour. She has made it another fact, which is how Frances’s daughter handles a fact when she is finally the one holding the file.
She is in her eighties. The gun is a clip. The kitchen and the corrections are the life. Henry’s porch is the first monument. She built a second, and she is still furnishing it: a mark on a soundstage, a folding chair at a rally, a book that tells a reader what to do on a Monday. Friends describe a professional who arrives early and leaves with the next date already in the book. The public that only wants Hanoi will not get a different photograph. The public that wants a cleaned saint will not get one either. What they get is a woman who sat on a gun, said so, opposed the war anyway, sold a tape, married climates, played Bree Daniels, and still takes a call time. That is a long argument. She has not retired it.
The last pictures are not a decline tour. They are a woman using the remainder of a famous face the way she used the remainder of a famous name: to get in the room. Moving On (2022). More Book Club. Interviews in which she will still say the sentence about the gun if asked, and will still say the war was wrong if asked. Both sentences stay. A complete life of Jane Fonda that drops either one is a weapon, not a biography. The chapter she is in now is the one in which she knows that, and keeps working anyway. She still studies a part the way Strasberg taught a frightened daughter to study a room: what is not being said, and what the body will have to carry.
After the spotlight moved
It has not moved. It has multiplied. Every celebrity activist still pays her a tax in actual risk and actual error. Every “Hanoi Jane” still steals a photograph. Klute is the correction. The tapes are the odd room in the house. The books are the file.
She came out of a monument’s kitchen, won as a call girl, sat on a gun, said she was wrong to sit, built a firm of sweat, married climates, and kept working. If you only remember the gun, you have the weapon. If you remember Frances, Klute, and the sentence about the photograph, you have her.
Portrait: Georges Biard · CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons