Acting the part:

Jane Fonda looks back on a life marked by controversy and transformation in the SoHo2 documentary Jane Fonda In Five Acts. Jane Mulkerrins reports.

Jane Fonda reflects on a life in

the spotlight.

Long before Madonna hijacked the title, Jane Fonda was the original mistress of reinvention.

Born into Hollywood royalty – “I grew up in the shadow of a national monument,” she says of her father, Henry – she first followed in his acting footsteps, winning two Oscars (for Klute and Coming Home) before becoming an activist and a fitness icon, then returning to the Hollywood fold at the age of 65.

A new documentary, however, divides up her 80 years differently.

Jane Fonda In Five Acts names the first four of the five ‘acts’ after the influential men in Fonda’s life: her father, followed by her three husbands – French director Roger Vadim, political activist Tom Hayden, and billionaire Ted Turner.

“None of my marriages was democratic because I was too focused on pleasing,” Fonda says.

In the fifth act, entitled Jane, she explains that it took leaving Turner for her to begin living or defining herself on her own terms.

“I’m a late bloomer,” deadpans Fonda, when we meet in a hotel in Los Angeles. That might be an exaggeration, but she is certainly impressively in demand as she enters her ninth decade.

Grace And Frankie, her Netflix comedy co-starring Lily Tomlin, Martin Sheen and Sam Waterston, is into its fourth series, and she starred in last year’s hit film Book Club, alongside Diane Keaton and Mary Steenburgen.

“Older women are the fastest growing demographic in the world. And movies and television, it’s a business,” she says, matter-of-factly.

The documentary features contributions from Fonda’s son, Troy Garity, and her adopted daughter, Mary ‘Lulu’ Williams, along with Tomlin and Robert Redford, plus two of her ex-husbands, Hayden (who died in 2016) and Turner.

Vadim, who is accused in the film of being a charismatic, compulsive gambler and an alcoholic, declined to take part.

Much of the film is narrated by Fonda herself, reflecting on and analysing her decisions, actions and motivations.

“Prior to my becoming an anti-war activist, I had lived an eventful life, an interesting life, but a meaningless life,” she tells me. “I was a pretty girl who made movies and was kind of hedonistic. And when I decided to throw in my lot with the anti-war movement, everything shifted. The way I looked at the world, the people I was drawn to, what interested me – everything changed.

“It took me until my mid-30s to get woke,” she says, employing the current parlance. “But I think if I’d been 20 and Trump had been elected, I would have been woke earlier.

“I’m proud that I went to Vietnam when I did,” she continues, referring to her controversial decision to visit Vietnam, which led to her nickname ‘Hanoi Jane’. “But I’m sorry that I was thoughtless enough to sit on that gun at that time and the message that that sent to the guys who were there, and their families.”

As she admits in the doco, “I will go to my grave regretting that.”

Today, she is no less ‘woke’. A few days after we meet, she was travelling to Michigan with her friend and co-star, Tomlin, “To be a voice for tipped workers, for people who work in restaurants – we’re fighting for one fair wage”, including fair wages for farm workers and domestic workers. “I try to use my celebrity in a good way,” Fonda says. Unusually, for a person in so public a position, Fonda is open about the lengths to which she has gone to preserve her career longevity. She admits, in Five Acts, that she wishes she hadn’t felt the need to turn to surgery. Today, though, she is sanguine. “It has helped me look good for my age – there’s no question,” she says. “I left the business for 15 years, and (without it) I might not have looked as good, so I might not have been hired, and I might not have had a new career, at an older age.” While she appears untroubled by thoughts of mortality (“I’m only 80 – there’s still a few decades to go, if I’m lucky”) she does believe that the documentary is, “Probably the definitive portrait of Jane Fonda – I don’t think there’s going to be another one after this.” But, in true activist form, she’s far less bothered about what it portrays of her than what it might do for other people. “I hope that it will encourage people to become active,” she says. “There’s a gangster running the country and we need an honest, right-thinking non-gangster to lead. “And that’s going to take every single person in this country to make that happen.”