Jane Fonda rose to fame as an actress in the pretty-blonde-starlet mold in
the early '60s and became an outspoken activist.
Fonda dealt with personal and political tragedies through every phase of her life
and there's more to her than meets the eye. Here are some tragic details about Jane Fonda.
Born “Lady” Jayne Seymour Fonda on December 21, 1937,
Jane Fonda had more to live up to than just a fancy name. Her father was actor Henry Fonda,
a Broadway star who would soon become movie famous for his Oscar-nominated performance in 1940's
Grapes of Wrath. Her mother was Canadian-born socialite Frances Ford Seymour Brokaw.
Henry and Frances had a troubled marriage and he was frequently away for acting work and for
Navy service during World War II. Henry was also continuously unfaithful. And Frances suffered from
mental health issues - according to Jane, her mother would now, quote, "be called bipolar."
Jane added that Frances was frequently institutionalized, expressing to The Guardian:
"When a parent isn't around, the child assumes it's her fault... assumes she isn't lovable."
After years of mental health struggles, Frances sadly took her own life at age
42 when Jane was just 12 years old. Henry told Jane and her brother, Peter, that their mother
had a heart attack. It wasn't until years later that Fonda discovered the truth in a magazine.
In an interview with People, Jane said she blamed herself as a child for her mother's death but
as an adult, she's learned to empathize with her mother's struggles by forgiving and understanding.
"If you can come to answers, which I was able to do,
you end up being able to say it had nothing to do with me."
If you or anyone you know is having suicidal thoughts,
please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255).
Jane Fonda's father Henry was already acting royalty by the time she was born,
thanks to his prestigious movie roles, where he played upstanding and decent men.
But his stiff upper lip didn't translate well into his home life. Henry was cold and distant,
responding to his children's tears or other displays of emotion with contempt.
He was frequently absent during their childhood, and just months after their mother's death,
45-year-old Henry married Susan Blanchard, who was only nine years older than Jane.
In her autobiography My Life So Far, Jane wrote that Henry constantly told her that she needed to
lose weight, an attitude she blames for her eating disorder. When Jane was 13,
it took her a week to work up the courage to tell him that she'd broken her back swimming,
and when she did, he made Blanchard take care of her.
Jane told The Guardian that the righteous moral
characters he played partly inspired her to become an activist, saying:
"I knew he loved these characters and I wanted him to love me."
She added that although he initially thought she was,
quote, "a foolish, frivolous person," but ultimately that he was proud of her.
Jane Fonda attended the all-girls Emma Willard boarding school in Troy,
New York, from 13 to 17. In 2015, she wrote on her blog:
"While I complained a lot at the time about the
strictness [...] it was the greatest gift my father could have given me."
According to the New Yorker, it was also at boarding school that Jane developed bulimia,
although the seeds of the disease had been sewn by her father. She wrote in her autobiography he:
"Had an obsession with women being thin."
Fonda stated that this directly contributed to her bulimia and later told the New Yorker
that it got particularly bad when she knew she had to look a certain way for an acting role.
At 46, Jane began to receive help for her disorder and said turning to a higher
power caused an epiphany that ultimately changed her life, telling The Guardian:
"I could feel myself coming together and being one person."
After dropping out of Vassar College in 1958, Jane Fonda moved to New York to take acting
lessons at the Actors Studio. After appearing in four Broadway plays and several movies, in
1963 she landed a role in a French movie and moved to France, where she quickly became a celebrity.
According to Vanity Fair, her agent introduced her to French-Russian
filmmaker Roger Vadim on her birthday of that year.. The two soon became lovers.
Vadim was the opposite of Fonda's repressed family. He was passionate,
emotional, and hated structure. After Fonda and Vadim married in 1965,
he decided they should have an open relationship and often brought his dates home. Initially Fonda
went along with it but later admitted she didn't enjoy the relationship arrangement.
"I wanted him to teach me how to be a woman,”
“Um, one of the-”
“So he taught me to be a female impersonator."
Vadim also kept asking her for money, which she reluctantly gave him,
but she later learned he was using it for gambling, racking up debts which Fonda paid
off using inheritance from her mother. The final straw for their relationship came when
Fonda took an interest in political activism in the US, which Vadim didn't share. Their
divorce was finalized in 1973 but they remained friends, co-parenting their daughter, Vanessa.
As a young actress, Jane Fonda experienced sexism in multiple forms.
In a 2016 essay, she wrote that from childhood she'd been taught:
"That to be loved, a female has to be perfect: thin, pretty,
having good hair, being nice rather than honest, ready to sacrifice, never smarter than a man,
never angry. I assumed I was paid less than the men and that I didn't deserve more."
In 2017, Fonda revealed that she'd been fired once for refusing to sleep with a boss, saying:
"I always thought it was my fault; that I didn't do or say the right thing."
Fonda is now a proudly outspoken feminist. She starred in 1980's 9 to 5, a comedy criticizing
gender workplace discrimination and in 2018 she pressed lawmakers to expand workplace
protections for female domestic and farm workers facing pay inequality and sexual harassment.
It took Fonda decades to address the sexism in her personal relationships with men.
She wrote in her autobiography:
"It took me 30 years to get it,
but it's OK to be a late bloomer as long as you don't miss the flower show."
In 1971, Jane Fonda met Tom Hayden onstage at an anti-war rally and they quickly fell in love,
according to the LA Times. Hayden had campaigned for Civil Rights and in 1968,
he helped organize the anti-war protests at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago,
for which he was prosecuted as one of the Chicago 7.
Hayden and Fonda married in 1973 and moved to a relatively poor area of Santa Monica.
When Hayden started running for political office, they founded
the Campaign for Economic Democracy to fund his campaigns and other liberal candidates.
Fonda was the breadwinner, taking on movie roles, writing books and launching her famous workouts.
But Hayden was often condescending towards Fonda's activism. And then,
as Fonda put it to the New Yorker:
"He fell in love with somebody, and it really devastated me."
But the breakup with Hayden in 1988 also freed her to become an activist in her own right, saying:
"I needed someone far wiser and more knowledgeable than I was about movement-building and politics.
I learned so much from him that I am forever grateful for."
Jane Fonda became passionate about anti-Vietnam War activism in 1968.
Her most talked about anti-war activism occurred in July 1972 on a two-week trip to North Vietnam.
According to the Washington Post, Fonda made a broadcast on the Voice of Vietnam radio station
which American pilots overheard, pleading with them to stop bombing. She met with seven POWs,
took film that she said proved the American government was bombing civilian targets,
and was photographed sitting in an anti-aircraft gun.
Fonda was working to end a war that was slaughtering soldiers in their thousands
but the trip made her infamous among Vietnam veterans, and enraged many people at home.
The broadcasts earned her the nickname Hanoi Jane, a reference to Tokyo Rose,
an American who had broadcast messages to POWs in Japan during World War II. The groundless
rumors persist to this day that the POWs were tortured into agreeing to meet her.
Fonda dismisses these claims but has apologized for two other Vietnam-era controversies.
In 1973, she said that POWs were lying about torture but she later apologized,
saying that torture most likely happened but that it wasn't systemic. As for the gun photo,
she has apologized numerous times, including on her blog in 2011 when she wrote:
"I simply wasn't thinking... I carry this heavy in my heart...
It was never my intention to cause harm."
And in an interview with SiriusXM saying:
"I will go to my grave regretting the fact that I was photographed sitting on an anti-aircraft gun."
The moment Jane Fonda's divorce from Tom Hayden was finalized in 1990,
she received a call from a stranger who happened to be a famous billionaire.
Ted Turner, founder of CNN, appeared to be the total opposite of counterculture hero Hayden.
According to the New Yorker, Turner asked Fonda out after reading about her divorce,
but she told him to ask again in a few months. He did and the following year
they married. But behind the scenes, the relationship was already starting to crack.
A month into the marriage, Fonda learned that Turner was having an affair.
They stayed together, but Fonda found herself smoothing over parts of her personality that
she felt Turner couldn't handle to make him happy, including her acting and activism.
In 2001, Fonda left Turner, later telling the New Yorker:
"It was really hard to leave... and yet I knew that, if I stayed,
I was never going to become who I'm meant to be as a whole person."
Born on February 23, 1940, Peter Fonda was two years and two months younger than Jane.
She described him in her memoir My Life So Far as:
"All deep sweetness, kind and sensitive to his core."
She told People Magazine in 2014 that he was deeply affected by
their mother's suicide and by the family's refusal to discuss it.
When he was 10, Peter accidentally shot himself in the stomach, according to
the New York Times and the incident inspired a lyric in the Beatles song "She Said She Said."
Peter also went into acting,
most famously appearing in Easy Rider alongside Dennis Hopper, for which he,
Hopper and Terry Southern were nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.
In 2014, Peter told the Express that he didn't get to see Jane as much as he'd like,
and that their attitudes towards life are different. He said:
"Jane is driven. I'm a driver."
However, before his death from lung cancer in August 2019,
the siblings spent what Jane described to People as beautiful alone time, adding that:
"He went out laughing."
Jane Fonda looks as energetic as ever after turning 80 in 2017. In 2019,
she moved to Washington D.C. to pursue climate activism,
getting arrested every week for what she called Fire Drill Fridays.
But even Fonda has struggled with the challenges of aging. In an interview with British Vogue,
she opened up about some of the health problems that have started
to affect her as she's got older, including osteoporosis and cancer.
Fonda had a small non-invasive tumor removed from her breast in 2010 and the surgery had been
said to be successful, according to People. But as Fonda explained to British Vogue, she had a double
mastectomy right before the 2016 Golden Globes, where she'd been nominated for Best Actress.
Although she didn't explicitly state exactly what kind of cancer she's had, she stated:
"I've had a lot of cancer."
Fonda also suffers from osteoporosis, which can be exacerbated by eating disorders,
although she says that it's genetic in her case because her father and brother also had it.
She's had both hips and knees replaced and told the LA Times in 2018 that she even has
a fake thumb. She's typically upbeat about aging, telling British Vogue:
"I didn't think I'd ever, ever live this long."
After breaking up with her boyfriend of eight years,
music producer Richard Perry, in 2017, Jane Fonda decided that she was done with dating.
As with her other most famous exes, she and Perry remained friends.
Months later, Fonda took her third ex-husband, Ted Turner, as her platonic date to her own
80th birthday party. But she doesn't think that her singledom is tragic, telling Vanity Fair:
"I'm single, which makes me very happy."
Fonda has said she finds romantic relationships with men to be the
most complicated parts of being a feminist. She wrote in 2016:
"For me to really confront sexism would have required doing something about my
relationships with men, and I couldn't. That was too scary."
She added:
"For me, the personal meant becoming a single woman, no longer silencing my voice,
slowly becoming the subject of my own life."
As Fonda proved over and over again,
out of tragedy can come understanding and a chance to start over, a little wiser.
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