Profile: Jane Fonda
http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/comment/Profile-Jane-Fonda.6282440.jp
Published Date: 09 May 2010
By Claire Prentice
THE website of the American Association of Retired Persons advises
its elderly readers to stay active and take some gentle exercise
three times a week: "Warm up. Start Slowly. Don't force it."
That advice is unlikely to be heeded by the most famous, and
flexible, pensioner in America. This week, the Queen of Work-Out
DVDs, 72-year-old Jane Fonda, slipped on her leotard, pulled her
leg-warmers up over her arthritic knees and turned up the pop music.
The actress, who in 1982 fronted one of the first and most successful
fitness videos ever, selling 17 million copies worldwide, is to
launch a new version aimed at baby boomers who will be encouraged,
like generations of Fonda's fans before them, to "feel the burn".
She is a good advertisement for her product. With wide sparkling
eyes, a wrinkle-free brow and impossibly perky bosoms, she looks
fantastic. At the age of 68, she became the face of L'Oreal. There's
nothing remarkable about a Hollywood icon having a little work done.
But Fonda is unusual in owning up to it. "I owe 30 per cent (of my
looks] to genes, 30 per cent to good sex, 30 per cent is because of
sports and a healthy lifestyle, and for the remaining 10 per cent I
have to thank my plastic surgeon," she said in 2009.
The only thing about her body that the actress and fitness queen
becomes a little touchy about are her creaky knees, which some have
suggested might have been brought on by those vigorous fitness
workouts in the 1980s. Not at all, she insists: osteoarthritis runs
in the family.
So does talent. Her father Henry Fonda was Hollywood royalty, the
anguished liberal everyman who loaned his stellar screen presence to
movies from 12 Angry Men to The Grapes Of Wrath. Her brother Peter
Fonda played a disillusioned outsider in Easy Rider and went on to
carve out a distinguished film career himself, while actress niece
Bridget Fonda is best known for her role in Single White Female. But
though there was no shortage of ability in the Fonda family, it was
also a lonely, dysfunctional place to grow up.
Jane Fonda's mother, the socialite Frances Ford Seymour, committed
suicide by cutting her own throat. The young Jane wasn't told at the
time and had to learn the truth many years later from a newspaper
article about her father. Henry Fonda was an emotionally unavailable
parent, wrapped up in his own career and love affairs. The young Jane
began a career as a fashion model, twice making the cover of Vogue,
and moved to Paris. When she returned to New York she studied under
the method-acting guru Lee Strasberg. Movies like Barefoot In The
Park followed.
But it was the French director Roger Vadim, her first husband, who
made Fonda a household name with the zero-gravity striptease which
began the interstellar sex flick Barbarella. Fonda's 2005
autobiography revealed that the sexual experimentation wasn't
reserved for on screen: the two invited other women to share their
bed. The marriage to Vadim produced a daughter but ended in divorce.
It was followed by marriage to the political activist Tom Hayden, and
her strengthening political views provoked the most notorious
incident of Jane Fonda's life. To travel to Hanoi at the height of
the Vietnam War was inevitably going to be inflammatory. But when she
flew to Vietnam in July 1972 she also gave a series of interviews
criticising the US and allowed herself to be photographed sitting on
a Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun which was being used to shoot at
American planes. The notorious images were used as propaganda by the
Communist authorities and almost ended her career. In 1988 she told
interviewer Barbara Walters: "It was the most horrible thing I could
possibly have done. It was just thoughtless." To this day, "Hanoi
Jane" is still a figure of hate amongst hardline US conservatives and
some Vietnam vets.
In 1982, after making hard-hitting films such as The China Syndrome,
Fonda made a film which touched America and brought her closer to her
father, with whom she had always had a difficult relationship. On
Golden Pond, the moving story of a reconciliation between an adult
daughter and a dying father, roles played by Jane and Henry Fonda
respectively, was widely seen as autobiographical. It won Henry Fonda
his only Oscar, which his daughter accepted on his behalf.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Fonda's leotard and legging-clad body was
beamed into homes across the world as she made 22 workout videos.
Cindy Crawford, Barbara Windsor and Davina McCall followed suit,
releasing their own fitness DVDs. But despite her sweaty imitators,
Fonda remains the queen of the home workout. And with her fitness
empire worth an estimated $600 million she has shed the pounds and
gained the dollars.
Having gone from one of the most hated women in America to one of the
most loved in little more than a decade, Fonda sealed the deal by
marrying Ted Turner, the billionaire owner of CNN, the TV success
story of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Turner was a driven
workaholic, who described his ambitions to be "the world's greatest
sailor, businessman and lover, all at the same time". During her
marriage to Turner, she relocated to Atlanta and devoted herself to
charity work, founding and running a charity devoted to preventing
teenage pregnancy. In 2001 she attended a showing of Eve Ensler's
Vagina Monologues and, with Ensler, founded V-Day, a movement to
combat violence against women and girls which has taken her to the
Middle East, Africa and Central America.
It lasted longer than her marriage to Turner, which ended in 2001.
But now Fonda is rumoured to be contemplating marriage again, this
time to music producer Richard Perry, a mere five years her junior.
In 1991 she announced her retirement from acting but seems unable to
resist a curtain call. She starred in 2005's Monster-in-Law with
Jennifer Lopez, and two years later with Lindsay Lohan and Felicity
Huffman in Georgia Rule. Diehard fans probably wish she'd stuck to
her original plan.
It's been quite a journey, from sultry interstellar sex kitten to
radical revolutionary to the woman who is regularly voted among the
women that Americans love most today. But as Jane Fonda again dons
her sweatbands and crunches her way to another million, this youthful
flat-bellied grandmother could be forgiven for looking back on her
extraordinary career with pride.
You've been Googled
Of her new workout DVD, Fonda said: "It will target an audience that
has been left out: my age group and the boomers. I want to get to
people who have stopped working out, or never did. I can't wait."
• In the 2004 US presidential election, Democrat candidate John Kerry
was described as a "Jane Fonda Democrat". A doctored photograph
appeared to show the pair sharing the stage at an anti-Vietnam War rally.
&149 She notoriously supported the radical black activists the Black
Panthers in a speech which declared: "Revolution is an act of love;
we are the children of revolution, born to be rebels. It runs in our blood."
• In 2005, Fonda planned to go on an anti-war bus tour with George
Galloway, left. Only the arrival of Hurricane Katrina put paid to the plan
• Fonda was chosen as one of People Magazine's annual 100 Most
Beautiful People in the World, in May 2007.
• Her first exercise video, Workout With Jane Fonda, is still the
best-selling workout video of all time.
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