JANE FONDA

After 40 years of playing every female archetype on- and offscreen, Jane Fonda, the original movie star activist, has earned a library’s worth of golden statues and a status to reckon with. Sometimes it feels like a half century of American women’s history has been written on the body of Jane Fonda.

She’s been a Vassar girl and a space age pinup; the expat wife to Roger Vadim and an antiwar activist still known as Hanoi Jane; the aerobics mogul helpmate to liberal politician Tom Hayden; the fly-fishing wife of billionaire Ted Turner; a teen pregnancy prevention pioneer; and a born-again Christian.

But if popular and political culture have been etched on Fonda, it’s only right, given the indelible marks she’s made on our cinematic history. For more than four decades, Fonda has created characters drawn from every corner of the American imagination: the cartoonish cowgirl of Cat Ballou (1965), the Earth girl of Barbarella (1968), a Neil Simon newlywed in Barefoot in the Park (1967). Fonda brought us prostitute Bree Daniels (1971’s Klute), a Depression-era dance marathoner (1969’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?), Lillian Hellman circa WWII (1977’s Julia), and a plucky, pissed-off daughter in On Golden Pond (1981).

But who better to embody the glories of American womanhood than Fonda, a performer so hale that her varied roles radiate brains and backbone to spare. This mistress of brisk capability must have had guidance along her hairpin turn of a career.

Who were Fonda’s mentors? “I didn’t have any, frankly,” she says with her gutsy twang, a voice so familiar that it might as well be made of grass and slate and soil.

The closest she got, she says, was her On Golden Pond mother, Katharine Hepburn, whom she writes about admiringly in her 2005 memoir My Life So Far. But the great Kate came into Fonda’s life too late to guide her through the wilds of her early years. “Had I known her earlier, I think I would have turned to her,” Fonda says. As it was, the actress, like her country, is sui generis ...

Read More About Jane Fonda in Elle