Jane Fonda, ageless at 80
Actress, activist and inspiration – Jane Fonda has just celebrated another milestone birthday. How does she do it?
BARBARELLA bombshell, big-screen sensation, fitness guru, ageless beauty, feminist, activist – and now streaming service royalty.
She’s Tinseltown’s queen of reinvention but even Jane Fonda herself could never have imagined her life at 80. She thought she’d be quietly pottering away in her garden, far from the flashbulbs and the big screen.
But it turns out life had other plans for her – and the octogenarian is certainly no doddering old dear, content to rest on her laurels in her twilight years.
The latest season of her hit series Grace and Frankie lands on streaming service Netflix on 19 January. She also recently celebrated turning the big 8-0. She has a few blockbusters on the way and she’s as ardent an activist as she’s ever been.
It’s her devotion to her role as a champion of charitable causes that keeps her going, Jane says.
“I thought we’d have a woman president [by my 80th birthday],” she told Vanity Fair magazine recently. “I thought I could maybe take up gardening. I didn’t think I’d be back on the barricades, no.”
In fact, she rang in her 79th birthday with old friend and Grace and Frankie co-star Lily Tomlin (78) at a Dakota Access Pipeline protest, joining thousands of people up in arms over the construction of a 1 886km underground oil pipeline.
Jane’s 80th birthday on 21 December was a little more glam – but she still used the occasion to champion a cause close to her heart. She hosted Eight Decades of Jane in Atlanta to raise funds for her charity Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Power and Potential (GCAPP), which focuses on teenage sexual health education and pregnancy prevention.
Guests forked out thousands for a spot at the exclusive Whitley Hotel, where they tucked into an eight-course meal – each one representing a decade of Jane’s life.
Dolly Parton and Oprah Winfrey sent video messages played on the night. Dolly offered guests a singalong of her hit song 9 to 5 and Oprah donated a whopping $100 000 (about R1,25 million) to the cause.
“You literally are, through your advocacy and through your actions, a master class in motion,” Oprah gushed about Jane.
GCAPP president and chief executive officer Kim Nolte couldn’t agree more. “Most people when they’re 80 are kicking back – she’s just cranking it up,” she said at the star-studded event, which raised a grand total of $1,3 million (R16,25 million). “I’ve never seen anybody work as hard as Jane.”
EVEN in her “aughts”, as Jane calls them, she’s hard at work in front of the cameras. And she’s still at the top of her game, with Emmy and Screen Actors Guild Award nominations this year for Grace and Frankie, which she
produces and stars in.
“I’m very grateful for the show because it gives us a chance to give a cultural face to older women,” Jane says of her Netflix comedy in which she plays uptight, firecracker Grace to Lily Tomlin’s airy-fairy Frankie.
She has a few big-screen projects in the pipeline too. There’s the romantic drama Our Souls at Night, which saw her sharing the screen with Robert Redford for the fourth time, then the comedy Book Club, with Diane Keaton and Candice Bergen. Despite her success on and off screen, Jane’s journey has been far from a smooth ride. In fact, she says that as a young star she didn’t even think she’d live to see 30.
“I never pictured 30,” she says. “I assumed I wouldn’t live very long and that I’d die lonely and an addict of some sort. I didn’t think if I did live this long I’d be vibrant and healthy and still working.” Jane’s socialite mother, Frances, committed suicide by slitting her throat when Jane was 12 and the actress has revealed she battled through a tough childhood with her distant father, Hollywood icon Henry Fonda.
Jane idolised her dad despite his emotional coldness, which led to a “fraught adolescence” filled with insecurity.
“I was brought up to feel fat,” she told the Daily Mail newspaper after the release of her autobiography, Prime Time, in 2011. “Though my father wouldn’t tell me directly – he’d get one of his wives [he married five times] to tell me I shouldn’t wear a bikini.
“One day, I overheard him talking about me and I can’t even tell you what he said because it traumatised me and I can’t pretend I’ll ever get over it.”
As a result, Jane battled with bulimia and had several troubled relationships.
She divorced three “alpha males”, as she calls them – Barbarella director Roger Vadim (who died in 2000 at the age of 72), social and political activist Tom Hayden (who died last year, aged 76), and media mogul Ted Turner (79).
Jane is now happily single after she and music producer Richard Perry (75) called time on their eight-year relationship in 2016.
“Romantic love is fleeting,” she told American magazine People just before her birthday. “I feel full of love. But it’s not romantic love.”
“[In relationships] you want to be seen. You want to be safe. You want to be celebrated. If you don’t feel seen, safe or celebrated, get out.
“My family has a long line of depressives in it. So to my children I’d say, ‘Try not to marry somebody who’s going to make that worse.’ ”
She has Vanessa (49) from her marriage to Roger and Troy (44) with Tom. She raised another child, Mary Williams (50), from when the girl was 14, but never legally adopted her.
While she cherishes her relationship with her children now, she has regrets about her involvement – or rather lack thereof – as a mom.
“It’s the one thing I wish I could do over,” she told People. “But I tell my kids I’m sorry. I didn’t know how, and I’m really, really sorry.”
ALMOST 40 years after she launched her Jane Fonda’s Workout empire in the ’80s, Jane still cuts an enviable figure on the red carpet. She credits this mostly to being “lucky” but she works out as often as she can, favouring hiking and Pilates – even after a knee and hip replacement.
“It hurt for a while afterwards, but I knew if I hadn’t gone back to working out, I wouldn’t be the person I am today, not only physically but mentally too, because being active physically as you get older is so important.
“I also watch what I eat, I meditate, I have enough money to get a trainer and have massages,” she says candidly.
She’s also happy to admit she’s been under the knife. “I finally got tired of looking tired when I wasn’t,” she wrote in her biography.
She’s had surgery on her jawline and under her eyes. “But I didn’t have the wrinkles taken away,” she insisted after the fact. “I still wanted to look like me, only a more rested me.”
But it’s how Jane has changed on the inside that she’s truly proud of. “I’m thankful I’ve gotten better over the 80 years,” she says. “I’m less judgmental. I’m forgiving. It wasn’t always true.
“I’ve really worked hard to get better as a human being.”