When Jane Fonda receives SAG-AFTRA’s Life Achievement Award on Feb. 23, it will commemorate the highest honor the organization can give to one of its members. However, it’s far from the first such recognition that the 87-year-old actress, activist and cultural figure has received, befitting a list of accomplishments that’s far too long for a single lifetime — even hers.
Even so, Fonda doesn’t mind the opportunity for a victory lap after almost nine decades of ups and downs. “Here’s the truth: I’ve been hated,” she tells Variety. “I know what it means to feel endangered. People have walked up to me with beautiful smiles on their face and gotten almost nose-to-nose and said, ‘I’d like to cut your fucking throat.’ I’ve had death threats and all of that. So to be popular is amazing.”
The Life Achievement Award caps a career that earned her an Emmy, two Oscars and eight Golden Globes, along with dozens of other nominations and kudos. She says all of it might not have happened after enduring some unenjoyable — and downright unpleasant — experiences when she first started acting. “I had decided after my first movie, ‘Tall Story,’ that I was going to quit while I was ahead,” Fonda remembers. “I didn’t enjoy the experience. And before we started shooting, Josh Logan, the director-producer, said to me, ‘You should have your jaw broken so your cheeks aren’t so puffy.’ Stuff like that really builds a girl’s confidence.”
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To her (and the world’s) benefit, Edward Dmytryk offered her a role in “Walk on the Wild Side” two years later. “That made all the difference in the world. She was a real character,” she says of her character Kitty Twist. “She wasn’t some cheerleader from next door that I had a hard time relating to. She rode around in a boxcar and then she becomes a hooker in a high-class brothel run by Barbara Stanwyck. And I had a blast.”
Unlike her father Henry Fonda, who was a stalwart of American cinema, the younger Fonda went international and explored the French New Wave movement. This led her not only to more exciting creative opportunities, but a number of pivotal relationships including a first marriage to director Roger Vadim. “I loved what was coming out of the nouvelle vague in France, and I spoke French, and so I was offered a movie there [‘Joy House’] by a very great director named René Clément, with Alain Delon. Who’s going to turn that down?” she observes. “The idea of not being so American, not being under my dad’s shadow, this was going to do it for me, going to Europe and working there. And then I fell in love with Vadim.”
She would make four films with her husband, including the sexy sci-fi adventure “Barbarella,” and later work with French New Wave luminary Jean-Luc Godard on “Tout Va Bien.” It was also during this time as an expat that she sparked what would become a lifelong passion for social activism, thanks to a crash course in world politics from Simone Signoret, wife of her “Tout Va Bien” costar Yves Montand. “She would take me to anti-Vietnam War rallies in France where Jean-Paul Sartre was speaking and Simone de Beauvoir was speaking,” Fonda remembers. “Eventually I decided that I was going to leave France and move back home and become part of the anti-war movement.”
Between her time in France and work in America, an exploding career and a nascent social conscience, Fonda earned her first Academy Award for playing iconic call girl Bree Daniels in Alan Pakula’s “Klute.” Reflecting this duality in both her life and career, she would subsequently use her platform as a celebrity to call attention to social issues, and her Hollywood muscle to tell complex, multilayered stories about them.
“‘The China Syndrome’ is an example of how I snuck gender issues into my character,” she reveals. “And ‘9 to 5’ happened because one of my colleagues in the antiwar movement created an organization in Boston where she organized women office workers. Eventually I said, ‘I’ve got to make a movie about this.’”
Five years after the end of the Vietnam war, Fonda won a second Oscar for playing a conservative military wife who falls for a paraplegic veteran in Hal Ashby’s “Coming Home.” The character’s transformation and growth would mirror her own, in that it wasn’t expected — or even intended — but an inevitable result of forces bigger than herself. “I haven’t always tried to make impact,” she insists, “but the fact that I started to produce my own movies and they were all women-centered because I wanted to have a role for myself, and I was starting to evolve as a woman, so the characters tended to be women who were evolving.”
That evolution eventually helped free Fonda from a pattern, detailed in her 2005 memoir “My Life So Far,” of allowing herself to be defined by the men in her life — first her father, then Vadim and her other two husbands, politician and activist Tom Hayden and media mogul Ted Turner. Still, she extracted valuable lessons from those relationships as she moved forward, and applies them even today — particularly as she continues to fight for human rights, anti-war, environmental and feminist causes. “Tom Hayden wasn’t necessarily a great husband, but he sure was a great teacher,” she admits. “And what I learned in those years was organizing means showing up on the ground and talking to the people that you are trying to persuade and change.”
“You have to talk to them,” she reiterates. “That’s why I love canvassing. You knock on doors and you get a chance to really know people.”
For the past two decades, the person she’s spent the most time getting to know is herself. “I am the quintessential late bloomer,” she says. “I grew up very late. I had a core of courage and empathy and decency, but I didn’t know who I was or what I was supposed to be, and as a result, I kept marrying men that I thought would give me the answer.” Fonda says that enlightenment has come with a growing acceptance of her status as a role model.
“It’s recent that I am starting to let that into my psyche and it makes me very happy because you don’t always know what kind of impact you have,” she says.
She can now measure that impact in a forthcoming spate of remakes of her films, including Jennifer Aniston’s planned reimagining of “9 to 5” and a “Barbarella” update starring and executive produced by Sydney Sweeney. Though she hasn’t been consulted on the latter — for which many sequels and spinoffs have been planned over the years — Fonda says she hopes that a new film will take a more progressive approach with the material than the damsel-in-distress version she brought to life back in 1968. “If I was remaking ‘Barbarella,’ it would definitely be a feminist movie,” she says. “Because whether people even are conscious of it or not, when a movie has a core reality that’s based in things that people are grappling with today, I think it just means more to people.”
Even so, Fonda isn’t resting on her laurels, and she’s not letting accolades go to her head. After a 15-year absence from the screen, she returned to acting in 2005 with a showy role opposite Jennifer Lopez in the comedy “Monster in Law,” and has since starred in several dozen films and TV shows, including 94 episodes of the Netflix series “Grace and Frankie.” Unsurprisingly, she’s paired that productivity with more activism — resulting in five more arrests (at age 81) and the development of the Jane Fonda Climate PAC, where she helps elect down ballot climate champions.
Her active involvement in these professional and political opportunities underscores the realization that even at 87, her life feels far from over. But ultimately, it’s Fonda’s determination to impact change, starting within herself, that make her achievements — past, present and future — worth celebrating. “I have just always felt that I wasn’t good enough,” she says. “That has made the difference — that I was never satisfied, that I always wanted to get better. I know why I made the mistakes I did, and I know what was in my heart. And so I really worked at it, and I’m proud of myself that I didn’t settle.”