JANE SEYMOUR FONDA, SOCIAL ACTIVISM IN CINEMA

Jane Fonda

December, 21. The Grandma has an intensive day of activities. Because of this, she wrote this post yesterday to be published today.

Political activism is necessary if you want to live in a society where freedom, democracy, justice, equality and civil rights are respected. Unfortunately, we have lots of examples today of false democracies which run under the appearance of true ones.

You must fight for your rights every day because if you are a passive citizen, you are going to lose them and you are not going to have enough time to recover them. It is a constant struggle, but perhaps, the most wonderful one, since the moment that you realize you are not alone fighting for your civil rights and you realize that if you work in community, you are fighting against one of the most terrible enemies of our century, the individualism, as Julius Caesar said: Divide et Impera, Divide and You Will Win.

Today, one of the best actresses and one of the strongest activists celebrates her birthday. She is someone who The Grandma admires a lot, as an actress and as an activist, and she has an intense life and some interesting opinions to be known.

Congratulations, Jane Fonda in your 81st anniversary!

Yesterday, before writing this post, The Grandma studied a new lesson of her Elementary Language Practice manual (Grammar 49).

More information: Prepositions of Place and Movement

Jane Seymour Fonda, born December 21, 1937, is an American actress, writer, political activist, former fashion model and fitness guru. She is the recipient of various accolades including two Academy Awards, two BAFTA Awards, four Golden Globe Awards, a Primetime Emmy Award, the AFI Life Achievement Award, and the Honorary Golden Lion.

Born to actor Henry Fonda and socialite Frances Ford Seymour, Fonda made her Broadway debut in the 1960 play There Was a Little Girl, for which she received the first of two Tony Award nominations, and made her screen debut later the same year in Tall Story.

She rose to prominence in 1960s with such films as Period of Adjustment (1962), Sunday in New York (1963), Cat Ballou (1965), Barefoot in the Park (1967) and Barbarella (1968). Her first husband was Barbarella director Roger Vadim.

Jane Fonda

A seven-time Academy Award nominee, she received her first nomination for They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969) and went on to win two Best Actress Oscars in the 1970s for Klute (1971) and Coming Home (1978). Her other nominations were for Julia (1977), The China Syndrome (1979), On Golden Pond (1981) and The Morning After (1986). Consecutive hits Fun with Dick and Jane (1977), California Suite (1978), The Electric Horseman (1979) and 9 to 5 (1980) sustained Fonda's box-office drawing power, and she won an Primetime Emmy Award for her performance in the 1984 TV film The Dollmaker.

In 1982, she released her first exercise video, Jane Fonda's Workout, which became the highest-selling VHS of all time. It would be the first of 22 workout videos released by her over the next 13 years which would collectively sell over 17 million copies.

Divorced from second husband Tom Hayden, she married billionaire media mogul Ted Turner in 1991 and retired from acting, following a row of commercially unsuccessful films concluded by Stanley & Iris (1990).

More information: Jane Fonda Official Site

Fonda divorced Turner in 2001 and returned to the screen with the 2005 hit Monster-in-Law. Though Georgia Rule (2007) was the star's only other movie during the 2000s, in the early 2010s she fully re-launched her career. Subsequent films have included The Butler (2013), This Is Where I Leave You (2014), Youth (2015), Our Souls at Night (2017) and Book Club (2018).

In 2009, she returned to Broadway after a 45-year absence from the stage, in the play 33 Variations which earned her a Tony Award nomination, while her major recurring role in the HBO drama series The Newsroom (2012–2014) earned her two Primetime Emmy Award nominations. She also released another five exercise videos between 2010 and 2012.

Fonda currently stars in the Netflix original series Grace and Frankie, which premiered in 2015 and has brought her nominations for a Primetime Emmy Award and two Screen Actors Guild Awards.

Jane Fonda

Fonda was a visible political activist in the counterculture era during the Vietnam War and later became involved in advocacy for women.

She was famously and controversially photographed sitting on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun on a 1972 visit to Hanoi, during which she became widely known under the nickname Hanoi Jane. She has also protested the Iraq War and violence against women, and describes herself as a feminist.

In 2005, she, Robin Morgan and Gloria Steinem co-founded the Women's Media Center, an organization that works to amplify the voices of women in the media through advocacy, media and leadership training, and the creation of original content. Fonda serves on the board of the organization.

More information: Women's Media Center

Jane Seymour Fonda was born in New York City on December 21, 1937. According to her father, their surname came from an Italian ancestor who immigrated to the Netherlands in the 1500s. There, he intermarried, and the family began to use Dutch given names, with Jane's first Fonda ancestor reaching New York in 1650. She also has English, Scottish, and French ancestry. She was named for the third wife of Henry VIII, Jane Seymour, to whom she is distantly related on her mother's side.

Fonda became interested in acting as a teenager, while appearing with her father in a charity performance of The Country Girl at the Omaha Community Playhouse.

Fonda's stage work in the late 1950s laid the foundation for her film career in the 1960s. She averaged almost two movies a year throughout the decade, starting in 1960 with Tall Story, in which she recreated one of her Broadway roles as a college cheerleader pursuing a basketball star, played by Anthony Perkins. Frequent collaborator Robert Redford also made his debut in that film.

Fonda attended the Emma Willard School in Troy, New York, and Vassar College in Poughkeepsie. Before her acting career, she was a model, appearing twice on the cover of Vogue.

Jane Fonda

In 1963, she appeared in Sunday in New York. Newsday called her the loveliest and most gifted of all our new young actresses. Fonda's career breakthrough came with Cat Ballou (1965), in which she played a schoolmarm turned outlaw. This comedy Western received five Oscar nominations, with Lee Marvin winning best actor, and was one of the year's top ten films at the box office. It was considered by many to have been the film that brought Fonda to bankable stardom.

The following year, she had a starring role in The Chase opposite Robert Redford, in their first film together, and two-time Oscar winner Marlon Brando. The film received some positive reviews and they said that: Jane Fonda, as Redford’s wife and the mistress of wealthy oilman James Fox, makes the most of the biggest female role.

After this came the comedies Any Wednesday (1966), opposite Jason Robards and Dean Jones, and Barefoot in the Park (1967), again co-starring Redford.

Fonda won her first Academy Award for Best Actress in 1971, again playing a prostitute, the gamine Bree Daniels, in the Alan J. Pakula's murder mystery Klute.

Fonda announced that she would make only films that focused on important issues, and she generally stuck to her word. She turned down An Unmarried Woman because she felt the part was not relevant.

More information: Screen Daily

In 1978, Fonda was at a career peak after she won her second Best Actress Oscar for her role as Sally Hyde, a conflicted adulteress in Coming Home, the story of a disabled Vietnam War veteran's difficulty in re-entering civilian life.

In 1980, Fonda starred in 9 to 5 with Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton. The film was a huge critical and box office success, becoming the second highest-grossing release of the year. Fonda had long wanted to work with her father, hoping it would help their strained relationship. She achieved this goal when she purchased the screen rights to the play On Golden Pond, specifically for her father and her.

Jane Fonda

Fonda continued to appear in feature films throughout the 1980s, winning an Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress for The Dollmaker (1984), and starring in the role of Dr. Martha Livingston in Agnes of God (1985). The following year, she played an alcoholic actress and murder suspect in the 1986 thriller The Morning After, opposite Jeff Bridges.

In the early 1990s, after three decades in film, Fonda announced her retirement from the film industry.

Fonda starred in her fourth collaboration with Robert Redford in the 2017 romantic drama film Our Souls at Night. The film and Fonda's performance received critical acclaim upon release.

In 2018, she starred opposite Diane Keaton, Mary Steenburgen, and Candice Bergen in the romantic comedy film Book Club.

During the 1960s, Fonda engaged in political activism in support of the Civil Rights Movement, and in opposition to the Vietnam War. Fonda's visits to France brought her into contact with leftist French intellectuals who were opposed to war, an experience that she later characterized as small-c communism. Along with other celebrities, she supported the Alcatraz Island occupation by American Indians in 1969, which was intended to call attention to the failures of the government with regards to treaty rights and the movement for greater Indian sovereignty.

More information: The Lily

She supported Huey Newton and the Black Panthers in the early 1970s, stating: Revolution is an act of love; we are the children of revolution, born to be rebels. It runs in our blood. She called the Black Panthers our revolutionary vanguard... we must support them with love, money, propaganda and risk." 

She has been involved in the feminist movement since the 1970s and dovetails her activism in support of civil rights.

In 1994, the United Nations Population Fund made Fonda a Goodwill Ambassador.

On February 16, 2004, Fonda led a march through Ciudad Juárez, with Sally Field, Eve Ensler and other women, urging Mexico to provide sufficient resources to newly appointed officials in helping investigate the murders of hundreds of women in the rough border city.

Fonda went to Seattle, in 1970 to support a group of Native Americans who were led by Bernie Whitebear. The group had occupied part of the grounds of Fort Lawton, which was in the process of being surplussed by the United States Army and turned into a park. The group was attempting to secure a land base where they could establish services for the sizable local urban Indian population, protesting that Indians had a right to part of the land that was originally all theirs. The endeavor succeeded and the Daybreak Star Cultural Center was constructed in the city's Discovery Park.

Jane Fonda

In addition to environmental reasons, Fonda has been a critic of oil pipelines because of their being built without consent on Native American Land.

In 2017, Fonda responded to American President Donald Trump's mandate to resume construction of the controversial North Dakota Pipelines by saying that Trump does this illegally because he has not gotten consent from the tribes through whose countries this goes and pointing out that the U.S. has agreed to treaties that require them to get the consent of the people who are affected, the indigenous people who live there.

Fonda argued that the military campaign in Iraq will turn people all over the world against America, and asserted that a global hatred of America would result in more terrorist attacks in the aftermath of the war.

More information: Flashbak

In 2015, Fonda expressed disapproval of President Barack Obama's permitting of Arctic drilling, Petroleum exploration in the Arctic, at the Sundance Film Festival. In July, she marched in a Toronto protest called the March for Jobs, Justice, and Climate, which was organized by dozens of nonprofits, labor unions, and environmental activists, including Canadian author Naomi Klein. The march aimed to show businesses and politicians alike that climate change is inherently linked to issues that may seem unrelated.

In addition to issues of Civil Rights, Fonda has been an opponent of oil developments and their adverse effects on the environment. In 2017, while on a trip with Greenpeace to protest oil developments, Fonda criticized Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau saying at the summit on climate change in Paris, known as the Paris agreement, Trudeau talked so beautifully of needing to meet the requirements of the climate treaty and to respect and hold to the treaties with indigenous people... and yet he has betrayed every one of the things he committed to in Paris.

More information: Time

I feel like my honesty gives people the freedom

to talk about things they wouldn't otherwise.

Jane Fonda