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Detailed biography of the actress, writer, producer,
activist, and philanthropist. With hyperlinked sections for each facet of
Jane Fonda's personal life and career. |
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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, and announced that she was giving up acting.
Her last motion pictures were Old Gringo (1989) and Stanley and
Iris (1990). Fonda filed for a divorce from Turner in 2001 |
