Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Mum came home from the mental institution and I refused to see her. She snuck out a razor and killed herself... it shaped my life
brother were there. Then I remember one afternoon her being taken to a hospital.”
The emotional gulf between Jane and her father deepened the moment he told his children their mother had died of a heart attack.
She remembers: “Dad dropped the news then went back to New York and did his play. That was dad.”
Henry, star of the powerful 1957 movie 12 Angry Men, packed Jane off to boarding school. And it was there, one year later, she discovered the terrible truth of her mum’s suicide. She says: “I found out in a movie magazine. It said the ex-wife of Henry Fonda had cut her throat.”
At school, Jane, who became a fitness industry work-out phenomenon decades later, developed anorexia and bulimia.
She says: “Mothers are often blamed for that but for me it was my dad. I made him ashamed. He thought I was fat. I knew he didn’t want me around because I embarrassed him. He told people that. “I heard my father say things about my body that has twisted my life ever since. “And, by the way, most of his wives suffered from eating disorders, including my mother.”
In 1968, Jane had a daughter Vanessa with first husband Roger Vadim and over the next few years shifted out of movies – despite winning best actress Oscar in 1972 for Klute – and in to political activism after the collapse of her marriage.
She was fuelled by drugs but starved of food.
“I took dexedrine, which is speed,” she says.
“I’m highly strung. But me on dexedrine without eating? And feeling I have to say everything all at once? I’m surprised anybody received what I was saying.”
That year Jane made a controversial trip to Vietnam to demonstrate against the war.
Being pictured with Vietnamese soldiers caused uproar in America. Some 58,000 US lives had been lost in the conflict.
Her visit was a PR disaster with calls for her to be tried as a traitor.
Jane has sincerely apologised for the hurt she caused by being “thoughtless and careless”. By the time she had married activist Tom Hayden in 1973 and had their son Troy, Jane was living in what her father called “a shack”.
The couple adopted Mary “Lulu” Williams and invited homeless people and Marxist writers to live alongside them.
Jane did her best to raise money to plough into political causes, which sparked her idea of her first fitness video, called Workout, in 1982.
She says: “That video became and remains the No 1 home video of all time.”
Workout sold more than 17 million copies and the profits went to Tom’s Campaign for Economic Democracy. Jane believes Tom thought her move in to fitness and back into films was superficial and their marriage ended.
Her third husband was the polar opposite – billionaire media entrepreneur Ted Turner. She says: “We were
ON HER PARENTS