Actor’s biker flick made him a cult hero
Peter Fonda, who has died from lung cancer aged 79, co-starred with Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider (1969), the lowbudget cult film that captured the mood of the American counter-culture at the end of the 1960s.
Cast as Wyatt, aka Captain America, astride a powerful Harley Davidson motorbike, Fonda was the more laconic of the long-haired pair as he and his spaced-out hippie friend Billy (played by Hopper, who also directed) hit the road from California to Florida via New Orleans blowing the proceeds of a big drugs sale.
Having made two earlier anti-establishment films, The Wild Angels and The Trip, Fonda was lionised as an idealistic emblem of an America in the throes of profound social upheaval.
Although a scion of a remarkable
Hollywood dynasty, headed by his father
Henry, with his sister Jane and daughter Bridget,
Fonda had suffered a bruising childhood against which he aggressively rebelled.
Now, after Easy Rider (which earned him a fortune), he found himself typecast in lowbudget films as a drug-taking biker. ‘‘I was Captain America, and where can you go with that? You can only ride so many motorcycles and smoke so many joints,’’ he mused.
It was almost 30 years later that he reclaimed his place in the limelight, winning a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of a remote, uncommunicative beekeeping grandfather trying to keep his family together in Ulee’s Gold (1997), a role he modelled on his father. That success provided a certain symmetry in a life that had been dominated by, and at odds with, Henry Fonda. But they were closer than they realised. For, as one critic pointed out, Easy Rider fitted into the American legend of its own idealism that Henry had done so much to incarnate.
Much ink has been spilt over the significance of Easy Rider, which has been identified with the Woodstock festival as one of the defining American cultural landmarks of the late 1960s. Remarkably it was his own idea, one that occurred to him in 1967 while promoting The Wild Angels, the earlier ‘‘biker flick’’ that had made him a star. Fonda realised that such road trips were the new westerns, ‘‘two cats just riding across the country . . . ’’, and – having hatched the notion of two drug-dealing bikers setting out from Los Angeles for retirement in Florida after a lucrative cocaine deal – cast himself as producer before phoning Hopper at
4.30am to invite him to direct.
Filming was fraught. There were screaming matches, and with the pugnacious Hopper high on drugs, Fonda locked himself in his trailer and supposedly became so paranoid about Hopper’s capacity to enforce his director’s writ with violence that he hired bodyguards. It was only after the wrap party that they realised they had forgotten to shoot the vital closing campfire scene in which Captain America famously declared ‘‘We blew it!’’ and had to film it later.
With its musical smorgasbord soundtrack from groups like Steppenwolf, the Byrds and the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the film might have
become an anthem for a generation, but for Fonda it was also an act of personal catharsis. At 29 he remained troubled by unhappy memories of his childhood and the home life created by his cold, distant father. Years later, he complained about being excluded from the life of his family, and blamed his disillusion and anti-Establishment views on his experiences with his father.
Easy Rider having made him a multimillionaire, Fonda could afford to spend the ensuing decades picking projects that largely kept him out of the limelight. But his film choices proved uninspired. But in 1998 came his Oscar nomination for his role in the small-scale drama Ulee’s Gold. The New York Times called his performance ‘‘quietly astonishing’’ and his finest work.
Peter Henry Fonda was born in 1940 in New York, but had a peripatetic upbringing as the family moved according to the dictates of his father’s acting career. The boy attended several boarding schools in New England, spending the holidays with his maternal grandmother as his mother, Frances, was mysteriously absent.
Henry Fonda told his son she was in a hospital, but Peter later realised that ‘‘hospital’’ meant ‘‘asylum’’, and that the heart attack that supposedly killed her was in fact suicide.
Before her death, Henry Fonda had told Frances he intended to divorce her to marry another woman, Susan Blanchard. While the newly-weds were away on their honeymoon, Peter shot himself with a .22 calibre pistol and nearly died, but insisted later that it was an accident rather than a suicide attempt.
Soon after his stepmother moved out five
years later, Peter, now 15, was sent to live with relatives in Omaha. He thrived at school and was accepted at the University of Omaha, where he began to seriously consider an acting career. Emerging after his third year like ‘‘a handgrenade with the pin pulled’’, he joined a summer stock (repertory) company in upstate New York before landing a part in a Broadway play. New York drama critics named him the most promising new actor of 1961.
On the strength of that accolade, Fonda moved to Hollywood. Determined to overcome the expectations of the Fonda name, he worked on and off Broadway and in edgy, experimental films such as Lilith (1964) and The Wild Angels , in which Fonda played a leather-clad biker.
By the time he starred in The Trip (1967), Fonda was a keen user of the psychedelic drug LSD, and it was in the prevailing acid-fuelled spirit of peace and love that he conceived Easy Rider and developed it with Hopper. As producer, Fonda raised $350,000 to make the film, which grossed a phenomenal $60m at the box office. Although hailed a cult hero, he earned a reputation for being difficult to work with.
Of his many indifferent road movies and onedimensional cameos, onlyDirty Mary Crazy Larry (1974), in which he played a renegade motorist opposite Susan George, proved of any enduring interest. As well as a ranch in Montana, Fonda owned an 82ft ocean-going yacht and sailed it extensively in the South Pacific.
His first two marriages were dissolved. Third wife Margaret DeVogelaere survives him with the two children of his first marriage, including the actress Bridget Fonda.