Spring Theater Special A Radical Vixen Retakes the Stage By CHARLES McGRATH The New York Times February 22, 2009
JANE FONDA, it's hard to believe, is 71. While the rest of us have just about managed one life, she's had half a dozen. She has been a sex kitten, a fashion model, a radical and war protester, an Oscar-winning movie star, an exercise impresario and the consort of a billionaire. Her marital history alone has made her a kind of cultural bellwether. Her first husband, the French director Roger Vadim, introduced her to threesomes; she first made love with her second husband, Tom Hayden, after he showed her some slides of Vietnamese peasants (this was back when people took foreplay seriously); and her third husband, Ted Turner, told her on their first date, "I have friends who are Communists." These days Ms. Fonda is revisiting an earlier incarnation, Broadway actress, and next month she will star in "33 Variations," written and directed by Moisés Kaufman, almost 50 years (46 if you want to be fussy) after she last appeared on Broadway, in "Strange Interlude" with Geraldine Page. She looks great, not that you were the least bit curious. She has had a new hip installed, and a few years ago she had her breast implants removed. But she is still willowy and glamorous; she still has that smoky, velvety voice; and age has brought out her bone structure - something that the director Joshua Logan used to fret about. When she was 21, she resisted his suggestion that she have her jaw broken and her back teeth pulled so that her face would have more definition. No longer the chubby-cheeked vixen of "Barbarella" and "Klute," Ms. Fonda has at last achieved a sort of Hepburnian elegance. She even looks a little like her father now. As it happens, Henry Fonda has been on her mind lately, she said recently, sitting in her dressing room at the Eugene O'Neill Theater, where "33 Variations" opens March 9. With her was Tulea, her Coton de Tuléar, a tiny, Bichon-like dog that is part of her accommodation to life without Ted. ... http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/22/theater/22mcgr.html *********************************** * POST TO [email protected] * *********************************** Medianews mailing list [email protected] http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
