Jane Fonda: Six decades of lust, controversy and revolution on and off screen

Last year, Jane Fonda was arrested five times. As her 82nd birthday approached, the actor was staging weekly climate crisis protests in Washington DC, accompanied by famous friends like Ted Danson and Joaquin Phoenix. “I may be detained overnight,” she told reporters, as she was once again led away in handcuffs. “One night. Big deal.”

It wasn’t the first time she’d spent a night in jail. Fifty years ago, a mugshot of Fonda with a fist raised and a new shag haircut became a piece of protest iconography. Ever since Fonda made herself an enemy of the Nixon administration by throwing herself into the fight for civil rights, supporting the Black Panthers and leading anti-war protests, Fonda’s activism has been intrinsic to who she is. It seems bizarre that she’s found time to fit in a prolific film career.

But Fonda’s been a magnetic screen presence since her first film role 60 years ago this week, in the romantic comedy Tall Story. Her blue eyes and distinctive low voice have brought life to every character she’s played – though that inaugural role reflects how far Hollywood’s view of women has shifted in her lifetime. In her debut, Fonda played a perky cheerleader who admits that she’s pursuing higher education “for the same reason that every girl, if she’s honest with herself, comes to college – to get married”.

Her character ensnares a naive basketball star played by Anthony Perkins (who would appear in Hitchcock’s Psycho later that year). To modern eyes, the film shows a film industry clinging to 1950s values, unaware of the societal changes the next decade would bring. Perkins and Fonda’s wholesome characters can’t act on the tension of a coy shower scene, for example, without getting married first. The whole plot revolves around sex, but nobody’s having any.

It wasn’t well-received. One Time magazine reviewer wrote: “Nothing could possibly save the picture… not even a second-generation Fonda with a smile like her father’s and legs like a chorus girl.” This kind of comment about her body was typical – as was the comparison to her Oscar-winning father Henry – and overlooked the charisma and energy Fonda brought to even her most lightweight films. She has a natural affinity for making audiences laugh, whether nailing physical comedy as a besotted newlywed in Barefoot in the Park (1967) or acerbic one-liners opposite J-Lo in Monster-in-Law (2005). “She saw the humour in things,” Robert Redford, her on-screen husband in Barefoot, observed. In the early years, however, most critics focused on her appearance.

She felt the pressure to look like an archetypal sex kitten in her first marriage, as well. Her husband, the French filmmaker Roger Vadim, directed her in one of her most famous roles: sci-fi siren Barbarella. The kitschy film turned Fonda into a 1960s pin-up, and when she appeared in costume on the cover of Life, the magazine declared her “the most fantasized-about woman in the world”.

This title sat uneasily with the star. Fonda had downed vodka before filming the infamous opening striptease, as she was “terrified” of taking her clothes off in front of the crew. When it was discovered that a bat had flown into the shot, she had to re-shoot the whole sequence hungover. Misadventures on set aside, she had also been struggling with bulimia since her schooldays. As she later said, “I was taught to think if I wanted to be loved, I had to be thin and pretty. That leads to a lot of trouble.”

It was her next film, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, that allowed Fonda to break out of her sex symbol image. In the Depression-era drama, her body is used not as an object of lust, but to draw attention to the bleak lengths people would go to for money. We can feel her exhaustion as the cynical Gloria drags herself through a brutal dance marathon, in the same way that we can sympathise with her nihilism.

open image in gallery

Nobody physically commits to a character like Fonda, who can disappear into the toughest of roles. In 1971, as Klute’s resilient but alienated sex worker Bree, she “somehow got to a plane of acting at which even the closest closeup never reveals a false thought”, wrote critic Pauline Kael. “Seen on the movie streets a block away, she’s Bree, not Jane Fonda, walking toward us.”

Meryl Streep, who shared scenes with Fonda in her first ever film in 1977, described her as having “an almost feral alertness… like this bright blue attentiveness to everything around her”. Fonda’s focus may have been intimidating, but Streep also recalled how the actor showed her how to stand on her mark so the light would catch her, helping her “like a big sister”.

Fonda’s sisterly support of other women led to her subversive 1980 comedy Nine to Five, which showed its female leads getting revenge on their sexist boss (and gave us an iconic workers’ anthem from Dolly Parton). “We dealt with all the issues — sexual harassment, unequal pay, the importance of flex hours, the importance of childcare,” Fonda later mused.

Commercial successes like Nine to Five and the anti-war drama Coming Home (1978) managed to smuggle Fonda’s progressive politics inside projects that the American public found palatable. “Why be a celebrity if you can’t leverage it for something that is this important?” Fonda said recently, discussing how she put her energy behind getting socially conscious films made.

open image in gallery

In 1982, Fonda used that stamina for something else. Something people have found themselves turning to during lockdown – her series of workout videos. She transformed the exercise classes that helped her finally overcome her eating disorder into a fitness empire, selling over 17 million copies. Once again, however, there was a political motive behind this accomplishment: the sales helped fund her second husband Tom Hayden’s state assembly campaign in California.

Although she’s left the colourful leotards behind, Fonda hasn’t slowed down. Her Netflix show Grace and Frankie has reached six seasons, in which Fonda and her Nine to Five co-star Lily Tomlin play unlikely friends whose husbands (Martin Sheen and Sam Waterston) leave them to get married. Tomlin and Fonda’s real decades-long friendship infuses the series with warmth and humour, and the show challenges ageism with its frank portrayal of older women’s sexuality. Fonda has said her goal making the show was “to give a cultural face to older women”.

Lately, Fonda’s also been on Instagram demanding financial relief for families impacted by Covid-19. And her #FireDrillFriday protests are still going (although all events are online for the moment, due to quarantine). Talking to Elle recently about her commitment to issues like the climate crisis, she said, “It’s very hard in life to find a way to align your body with your deepest values, and that’s what civil disobedience can do.”

It’s what she’s been saying for years. When she was asked about her politics in 1970, she replied, “Any healthy country, like any healthy individual, should be in perpetual revolution.” Her life and career, over the course of six decades, has embodied that revolution.