Jane Fonda: On Golden Fonda

Now Fonda has arrived at still another turning point. Her 16-year marriage to Hayden is over, and her ten-year partnership with Bruce Gilbert (who produced all of her movies from Coming Home to The Morning After) has also ended. She's 51 years old, and although her Workout-primed body would be the envy of women half her age, there's no denying that she's well into middle age. Fonda speaks frequently of craving challenge, and the greatest one she faces may be simply holding on to stardom in a culture that worships youth and is constantly on the lookout for new faces to supplant yesterday's idols.

Fonda is well aware of the problems that aging actresses have traditionally faced in Hollywood. Male actors like Clint Eastwood have continued to win juicy starring roles well into their fifties and sixties, but that has been far less common for women. "What happens very often," Fonda observes, curled up on a sofa in her spacious, secluded Santa Monica production office, "is that Women will have a really nice career up to a certain point, and then between the ages of 45 and 65, there's a sort of semi-retirement. Then they come back as character actresses and win their third Oscar. I don't want to do that. I would like to be able to keep going as an actress through that period. It's undeniable that there are fewer roles for women as you get older. But I intend to put a dent in that. I like challenges, and I'm looking forward to breaking some ground in this area if I can."

She has by no means surrendered to Hollywood's gender and age biases, but a new approach to her career suggests that Fonda's taking account of some hard realities. "I'm beginning to work on projects that I would produce for other people," she says. "And that's feeling very comfortable for me. Recently I bought A Bright Shining Lie, the book by Neil Sheehan that just won the Pulitzer Prize. There's no role for me in that. But it's a 20-year dream come true to do a history of the Vietnam war."

Her enthusiasm for this project is unabashed, and it demonstrates that she has not turned her back on the strong leftist principles that made her so controversial during the '70s. Although Fonda seemed to be recanting when she appeared on a Barbara Walters TV special and publicly apologized to Vietnam veterans for the anti-American rhetoric she spouted in Hanoi in 1972, she clearly has no intention of disavowing her belief that the U.S. government's policy in Vietnam was tragically misguided. A Bright Shining Lie may represent Fonda's most ambitious attempt to vindicate the antiwar movement that she championed two decades ago.

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