A two-time Oscar winner also made the best-selling VHS tape ever
Jane Fonda won best actress twice in the 1970s, yet one of her biggest hits had no plot at all. Jane Fonda's Workout, released in 1982, became the highest-selling VHS ever, and it spawned 22 sequels over 13 years that together sold more than 17 million copies.
Fonda was born in Manhattan on December 21, 1937, to actor Henry Fonda and Canadian-born socialite Frances Ford Seymour. She was named after Henry VIII's third wife, a distant maternal relative, which earned her the childhood nickname Lady. Her father traced the family name to a Genoese forebear who settled in the Netherlands, with the first Fonda reaching New York in 1650. Before acting she modelled, landing the cover of Vogue twice, and she studied art in Paris for six months after leaving Vassar.
The pivot came in 1958, when Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio told her she had real talent; she later said it was the first praise she had received from anyone other than her father. Her 1960 Broadway debut drew a Tony nomination and her first film followed that year. Cat Ballou (1965), in which she played a schoolteacher turned outlaw, made her bankable, and Barbarella (1968) cemented a sex-symbol image. She also turned down Lara in Doctor Zhivago, unwilling to spend nine months on location, and later passed on Rosemary's Baby and Bonnie and Clyde.
They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969) changed how critics saw her. Pauline Kael predicted she might dominate the coming decade as Bette Davis had the 1930s. Fonda prepared for Klute by interviewing sex workers and madams, and her role as the call girl Bree Daniels won her first Oscar; Coming Home (1978) brought the second. Her activism against the Vietnam War also made her a lightning rod, and a 1972 photograph of her seated on an anti-aircraft gun in Hanoi produced the lasting nickname Hanoi Jane.
She stepped away from acting after marrying Ted Turner in 1991, returning in 2005 with Monster-in-Law. In 2009 she went back to Broadway after 46 years in 33 Variations, and she starred in Netflix's Grace and Frankie from 2015 to 2022.
Source: Jane Fonda
