Jane Fonda

Jane Fonda, born in 1937, American motion-picture actor, political activist, and writer and producer of exercise books and videos. Daughter of motion-picture actor Henry Fonda, she was born in New York City. She attended Vassar College but did not graduate. After studying with acting teacher Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio in the late 1950s, Fonda was named most promising actress of the season by the New York Drama Critics’ Circle for her Broadway debut in There Was a Little Girl (1960) and was praised by critics for her early motion-picture work in A Walk on the Wild Side (1962) and Sunday in New York (1964). After moving to France in the mid-1960s, she met and married French film director Roger Vadim. Later she starred in Vadim’s erotic motion picture Barbarella (1968).

Tired of being cast in so-called sex-kitten roles, and opposed to American involvement in Vietnam, Fonda returned to the United States in the late 1960s. She toured the country as an antiwar activist and also took on dramatic roles in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969), and Klute (1971), for which she won a 1971 Academy Award for best actress. She was reviled as “Hanoi Jane” in 1972 for visiting North Vietnam during the Vietnam War. She married American political activist Tom Hayden in 1973 and withdrew from acting for several years. Returning to the screen in the late 1970s, she won a 1978 Golden Globe Award for best actress for her portrayal of American dramatist Lillian Hellman in Julia (1977). Fonda formed her own production company, IPC Films, and won a second Academy Award for best actress for her role as the wife of a Vietnam War veteran in Coming Home (1978). Other notable IPC productions included the nuclear-plant thriller The China Syndrome (1979) and On Golden Pond (1981), in which she played daughter to her father, Henry Fonda.

She also wrote the best-selling Jane Fonda’s Workout Book (1981) and produced a series of popular instructional videocassettes on exercise. In 1991 she married business executive Ted Turner, but a decade later the couple divorced. Among her other motion pictures are Old Gringo (1989), Stanley and Iris (1990), Monster-in-Law (2005), and Georgia Rule (2007). Her autobiography, My Life So Far, was published in 2005. Fonda received a lifetime achievement award from the Cannes Film Festival in 2007.