Jane Fonda: The Loves Of The Exercise Queen
http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/173178/Jane-Fonda-The-loves-of-the-exercise-queen-
May 5,2010
By Virginia Blackburn
IT WAS a certain rosy glow that gave the game away. Jane Fonda may be
72 and a veteran of the surgeon's knife for reasons both medical and
cosmetic but the preternaturally youthful Hollywood icon still has
the capacity to surprise. Now in her eighth decade and a full 28
years after she almost single-handedly kicked off the Eighties
fitness craze Jane is back with a new exercise DVD aimed at baby boomers.
Hip replacements and arthritic knees are not going to get in the way
of this new baby: Jane may have experienced the knocks of old age but
her determination and commercial acumen are as strong as ever. "[My
new DVD] will target an audience that has been left out," she said.
"My age group and the boomers. I want to get to people who have
stopped working out or never did. I can't wait."
All stirring stuff and quite enough to put a spring in anyone's step
but there's another reason that Jane's looking so pleased with
herself: she's got a new man.
Indeed, nuptials are rumoured to be on the cards for the fourth time,
this time to Richard Perry. To a certain extent Jane Fonda has always
been defined by her men, starting with her father Henry.
A new husband has always meant a transformation, which in turn has
given her career a greater longevity than most of her peers, and she
has done it again. Aged 72, Jane has embarked on yet another new start.
Lady Jayne Seymour Fonda was born on December 21, 1937. The family
was Hollywood royalty. Her father Henry was an iconic figure, one of
the greatest actors of his generation. But he was not ideal husband
or father material.
Jane was 12 when her mother, socialite Frances Ford Seymour,
committed suicide by cutting her own throat. "She had been
institutionalised and the last time she came home with the nurse the
nurse was there to keep her from doing this," Jane said in an
interview in 2005.
"But she got away from her and went up and got a little lacquer box
that had a razor in it and she went back to the institution and cut
her throat."
WORSE still, Jane wasn't told the truth at the time and had to find
out through the press. "They said she had a heart attack and then,
one day, someone passed me a movie magazine with a story about my
dad," she continued. "And it said: 'And his wife, Frances Seymour
Fonda, cut her throat.' "
Jane and her younger brother Peter, who is also an actor, were left
to the care of their only surviving parent and it would not take a
psychiatrist to see that this is where Jane began to start needing to
please men. But Henry was a distant father who was caught up in his
own career and subsequent marriages. Jane had to get by as well as she could.
She became a fashion model before attending the distinguished Vassar
College in New York, after which she went to Paris for two years to
study acting.
On her return to New York she studied under Lee Strasberg, the
pioneer of method acting, and another of the men who was to have a
profound effect on the soon-to-be star. "I went to the Actors' Studio
and Lee Strasberg told me I had talent," Jane later recalled. "It was
the first time that anyone, except my father who had to say so
told me I was good. At anything. It was a turning point in my life. I
went to bed thinking about acting. I woke up thinking about acting.
It was like the roof had come off my life."
Jane started as a stage actress but soon moved into films, notching
up such successes as Cat Ballou and Barefoot In The Park but it was
1968's Barbarella, the space-age saga, that marked her out from the
rest. Barbarella was directed by her first husband Roger Vadim: the
Frenchman was responsible for turning Jane into the first of her many
incarnations, this time as a sex kitten, as she pouted her way across
the universe in thigh-high boots.
The marriage produced a daughter, Vanessa Vadim, but it was not to
last. Like all of her husbands (and her father) Roger was controlling
and sought to bend Jane to his whim. There was shock when her 2005
autobiography revealed that, at his request, the two of them would
invite other women into their bed. The divorce came in 1973.
Husband number two was the political activist Tom Hayden, which
brought a second child into the world, Troy Garity, and ushered in
the era of Hanoi Jane.
Jane caused uproar when, as a fervent protester against the war in
Vietnam, she was pictured sitting on a Vietnamese anti-aircraft
battery deployed, of course, to bring down US planes. This, she now
says, is one of her biggest regrets but it didn't derail her career.
Fun With Dick And Jane, The China Syndrome and Nine To Five followed.
And then in 1982 one of her most touching films came out, On Golden
Pond, the rights to which she had bought so that she could star with
her father Henry. Widely seen as a sign of reconciliation between
them, it brought Henry his only Oscar. He died shortly afterwards,
Jane having accepted the award on his behalf.
That was also the year Jane released the first of her workout videos,
unleashing yet another strand of her phenomenally successful life.
Women of the world, told that they didn't need to turn into
middle-aged frumps, loved it: 17 million of the videos have been sold
to date. "Go for the burn," she told them, and they did.
And so Jane the self-made entrepreneur was born and when her marriage
to Hayden fell apart in 1990 he left her for another woman it
seemed only fitting that husband number three should be one of the
US's most successful businessmen, Ted Turner. The union in 1991 with
Turner, a media mogul, was not to last the distance either the
divorce came through nine years ago but for a decade they were one
of America's foremost power couples.
And now, by all accounts, a fourth wedding is on the cards to Richard
Perry, five years her junior, whom she met through Carrie Fisher. He
is a music producer so could a new career as a chanteuse be on the cards?
Yet it is her latest incarnation, as glamorous older woman, that has
really endeared Jane to her fellow women, not least because she has
consistently proved that there is life after 40, even in Hollywood.
She admits her still-stunning appearance is not down just to nature:
there have been facelifts and breast augmentations alongside the
rather less glamorous hip replacements and work on the knees. There
has been speculation that the last of these has, ahem, been caused by
the exercise she so avidly avows but Jane is having none of it.
Osteoarthritis runs in the family, she says.
Certainly it's not difficult to warm to Jane in her latest
incarnation. For a start, her plastic surgery does not make her look
odd like, say, Joan Rivers just very good for her age.
And second, unlike so many of her contemporaries, she doesn't lie.
"I owe 30 per cent [of my looks] to genes, 30 per cent to good sex,
30 per cent because of sports and a healthy lifestyle and for the
remaining 10 per cent, I have to thank my plastic surgeon," she
remarked last year.
Is it any wonder that women like her as much as men? Four years ago,
at the age of 68, she became the face of L'Oréal and while it might
have been for their anti-ageing creams, wouldn't every woman like a
new string to her bow, especially if it involved a cosmetic company,
at that age?
Sex kitten, anti-war protester, fitness guru and now one of the
world's most popular grannies, Jane Fonda might have been influenced
by her menfolk but now looks more comfortable in her own skin than
she ever has done.
Indeed, she has risen beyond the lot of them to become one of the
most famous and successful women of her generation.
You've come a long way, baby, as the ad almost had it. Now we only
have to wait to see what she does next.
.
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