LEGENDS OF CINEMA: JANE FONDA ICON, ACTRESS AND ACTIVIST

One of the strongest, smartest and outspoken leading ladies of all time, Jane Fonda has redefined the role of women in cinema.

Over an extraordinary six-decade career, this gifted actress has not been afraid to use her fame as a platform for political, social and feminist activism.

Now 82, she’s still as versatile and talented as ever while remaining an important and influential crusading voice in the world.

It would have been hard to see any of this coming from her breakthrough role as a sexy space vixen in the 1960’s sci-fi romp Barbarella. But that decade also allowed her to demonstrate she was so much more than a pretty face thanks to winning comedies like Barefoot in the Park and top-notch dramas such as They Shot Horses Don’t They.

Fonda won two Oscars in the 1970’s for playing an imperiled prostitute in Klute and a military wife in Coming Home. But she won enemies then too for stepping up her activism, especially by protesting the Vietnam War and being dubbed Hanoi Jane after posing for a protest photo with a Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun.

In the 1980’s she was reinvented as a fitness queen and the face of the workout craze, selling countless exercise videos. On the big screen her best work came in family drama On Golden Pond, alongside her legendary actor father Henry Fonda, and in the comedy 9 to 5 with Dolly Parton and Lily Tomlin.

The 90’s began with her starring alongside Robert De Niro in Stanley & Iris but that would be her last film for 15 years as she stepped away from Hollywood to focus on married life with her then husband, CNN founder Ted Turner, increased activism and writing her autobiography.

Her glorious return came in 2005 comedy Monster-in-Law alongside Jennifer Lopez and that hit comedy revitalized her career, leading to a string of further film roles and then a switch to TV in the next decade with roles in Aaron Sorkin drama The Newsroom and then in the ongoing Netlfix comedy Grace and Frankie, which reunited her with Lily Tomlin.

Recently she’s been conducting a campaign of civil disobedience to demand action on climate change and on her 82nd birthday brought 82 fellow protestors along to get arrested with her.(see cover photo)

What an original, what a talent and what a force. Happily, there’s no stopping Jane Fonda.

—Sandro Monetti

Hollywood International Film

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