Author: Ari Shapiro / Source: NPR.org
About 20 years ago, to mark her 60th birthday, Jane Fonda asked for her daughter’s help in creating a very short video about her life.
Her daughter suggested, “Why don’t you just get a chameleon to crawl across the screen?”“Ouch,” Fonda says, recalling the conversation. “She knew what buttons to push and she wasn’t wrong.”
Fonda has lived many lives. From starlet, to fitness guru, to Vietnam protester — now 80, she’s a comedic actress, securing roles at an age when many in Hollywood would have left the screen.
Filmmaker Susan Lacy tells Fonda’s story in a new HBO documentary called Jane Fonda in Five Acts. The first four acts are organized around the men in Fonda’s life — her father, Henry Fonda, and her three husbands, Roger Vadim, Tom Hayden and Ted Turner. The last act is Fonda’s own.
Fonda acknowledges she’s redefined herself again and again, but says her courage has been a constant. “I’ve always been brave,” she says. “There’s been a certain integrity and that was always there in spite of my willingness and talent at becoming who my husbands wanted me to be.”
Lacy describes the documentary as a portrait.
Fonda — who only saw the film after it was complete — says it’s a “gender journey.”At every stage of her life, Fonda says she’s asked herself: Am I all that I can be? “One of the things I hope that people will take away from my documentary is the value of an examined life,” she says. “You don’t become wise by having a lot of experience; you become wise by reflecting deeply on the experiences that you’ve had.”
“I’m almost 81 and I feel better than I ever have,” she adds. “I know that sounds preposterous, but it’s true.”
Interview Highlights
On being a “late bloomer”
Up until my 60s, I never thought that relationships should be democratic. I had never seen a democratic relationship between a man and a woman. Certainly my father who was married five times — none of his relationships were democratic. So I just thought it was the way things are supposed to be. I tried to do whatever I could do to be sure that the men I was with — all of whom were utterly brilliant and fascinating — loved me.
I was a pleaser and it took me into my 60s and 70s to begin to say: I deserve respect. I am somebody on my own standing, on my own two feet, and I’m going to begin to define my own life. [It] took a long time, but we…
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