JANE FONDA Happier than ever at 83
The movie legend gives her take on modern sex scenes, men who prefer women to be powerless and why she’s done with romance
IT IS a truth universally acknowledged that as a Hollywood actress starts to age, she would sell her soul to be young again. And then there is Jane Fonda, who, quite frankly, can’t think of many things worse than reversing the clock. “They say that 70 is the new 40,” she says with a faint shudder. “I wouldn’t want to be 40 again for anything! What’s good about 40? If you’re a woman you’re probably going through perimenopause and things are pretty miserable. I hated 40.
“But for women of my age these days, well, we’re staying healthy longer because we’re knowing more about how to be healthy. We stay more physically active and we may be eating a bit more carefully, so we’re going to live longer.
“We’re happier – it has been proven that people over 50 tend to be more positive than those under, just because we’ve survived so much.
“And, particularly for women, we become braver. We become more like fighters. A lot of us – like me, for instance – we’re not with men any more who don’t want us to be strong. So we have the courage, we have the wisdom, and we have the numbers. So watch out for us!”
JANE is 83 now and, by anyone’s standards, looking terrific on it. True, there are lines etched around those huge intelligent eyes, and she maybe moves a little more stiffly than she did. But make no mistake, here is one octogenarian who is living her life to the full and loving it.
“I’ve had some surgery,” she admits. “I’ve had three hip replacements – not that I have three hips but one had to be done twice.
“But you know hip surgery, if it’s done by a good doctor, it’s not so bad as long as you do your exercises, and in a month after it you’ll be walking a mile. Much more complicated is the knee replacement – as I know because I also have a fake knee.
“It’s the shoulder surgery that’s really tough, but I haven’t had to do that.
“And I do keep myself in shape
– it’s particularly important to do that as you get older and start to need these surgeries because you bounce back quicker if you’re strong and healthy and flexible. I sleep nine hours a night, I exercise, and I eat well, so that’s why I have energy.”
She’s been harnessing that energy all her life – not only as an actress but as a tireless social crusader, fighting for everything from political causes and feminist causes to, currently, protecting the environment and battling climate change.
“And if we don’t solve that one,” she says now, “everything else will be moot. I’m famous, so I have a platform and I can reach a lot of people. And I’m almost 84 and what that means is that for the rest of my life, climate change will be at the centre of my attention.
“I’ve been holding virtual protests every week – we call them Fire Drill Fridays – throughout the pandemic, and the minute we can be together again in person, I’ll be out there fighting the fight and encouraging people to engage in civil disobedience.”
She says she inherited her social conscience from her father, Henry Fonda, who famously personified simple American decency in such films as Young Mr Lincoln, The Grapes Of
‘I wouldn’t want to be 40 again for anything! What’s good about being 40? I hated 40’
Wrath, and Mister Roberts.
“But he didn’t talk to me about these things as such,” she says now. “My father wasn’t a talker. He was remote – he was from the Midwest and he came from a certain generation of men who never wanted to show emotion, and he didn’t like people to be emotional in front of him, either.
“I’ll tell you a quick story about him. I was writing my memoirs, My Life So Far, and I happened to be writing about my father when Martin Luther King’s daughter, Yolanda, called me – I can’t remember what about. “And I said, ‘Wait a minute, Yolanda, let me ask you a question.Your father, Martin Luther King – did he ever sit you on his lap and teach you about the values of life?’ She said, ‘No, he didn’t’.
“I said, ‘No, my father never did that either for me. But you have your father’s sermons and I have my father’s films, and it was through his films that he taught me values like fairness and justice and equality and never to be a racist.’
“He taught me values through his movies and I loved him and admired him very much. I think about him every day.Truth be told, I still feel him very much present in my life.”
Sadly, her mother killed herself when Jane was only 12 years old, and the actress has said that it was partly her father’s remoteness that has caused her consistent failures at romance.
Her mother once told her: “Love is complicated for people who did not grow up with parents who looked into their children’s eyes with love.” Three times married, she says
she is over romance now – “at my age, I think I’m done,” she shrugs. Among the men she might have been accusing of not wanting her to be strong, were her ex-husbands French film director Roger Vadim, political activist Tom Hayden and cable TV tycoon Ted Turner. Her most recent relationship, with record producer Richard Perry, ended four years ago.
Not that she has a moment to be lonely, with three children (two biological, one adopted), an assortment of grandchildren and, most important of all, a core group of women friends who, she says now, mean the world to her. “And I wasn’t brought up to regard women as friends – I was brought up to compete with them. But the most important thing that happened to me was when I was a young woman and had just become an activist and was working outside a military base in Texas.
“There was a woman running a coffee house there, and the way she treated me – and the way she treated all other women, too – well, I’d never seen anything like it before. I felt like I was in a warm bath. She’d actually ask my opinion!
“She made me feel safe and she made me feel seen for who I was, and for me it was like looking through a keyhole into the world that we women were fighting for. ‘Oh – this is what it’s supposed to feel like’. And that totally changed the way I viewed women friends from then on.” That attitude has affected her professional relationships too: “For all the films I’ve worked on, I’ve stayed friends with the women in them afterwards much more than I have with the men.”
‘I’ll be out there fighting the fight and encouraging people to engage in civil disobedience’
SHE says that she feels for the young actresses of today. “It’s so much harder for them because of all the pressure. “My first movie was a black-andwhite movie, and in those days even if you were playing a married couple, your characters slept in separate beds. And now you have to be naked!
“There’s so much pressure on women to have to be naked and sexy and all those things – it’s way more exposure than we ever had in my day.”
And don’t get her started on social media. “You have to be so much more careful because you never know who’s taking a picture. I’m just glad that it wasn’t around when I was coming up because I wouldn’t be alive right now. I think it’s really hard and I don’t envy these young ones at all.”
And Jane Fonda, 83 and perfectly content in her own skin, nods firmly.