My brother Peter went out laughing says Jane Fonda
JANE FONDA has paid a touching tribute to her younger brother Peter who has died aged 79, saying he ‘went out laughing’.
The actress, 81, who was with the Easy Rider star in his last days, said their final hours together had been ‘beautiful’.
She said: ‘I am very sad. He was my sweet-hearted baby brother, the talker of the family. I have had beautiful alone time with him these last days. He went out laughing.’
Fonda, whose daughter Bridget is also an actress, died of respiratory failure caused by lung cancer at his home in Los Angeles on Friday.
Last night stars went on social media to pay tribute.
Guillermo del Toro, Oscar-winning director of The Shape Of Water, tweeted: ‘Gentle, generous, wise soul… He helped change cinema but he also lived a life full of love and made this world better.’
Monkees star Mickey Dolenz wrote ‘RIP Easy Rider’, while actor Billy Baldwin said: ‘We lost one of the good ones.’
Fonda, who followed his father Henry and sister Jane into the acting profession, initially struggled to emulate their success. His fortunes were transformed by the success of the 1969 classic Easy Rider. Fonda produced, starred in and cowrote the cult movie which followed the exploits of two bikers as they rode through America’s South with the e proceeds of a drug deal.
The film, which went out of f its way to embrace contro- versial subjects such as drug use and free love, caused a sensation on its release.
Shot on a budget of just $400,000 it became the third most successful film of the year, taking more than $60 million at the box office.
Critics hailed the film – which starred Fonda as Wyatt and Dennis Hopper, the film’s director, as Billy – as the ‘touchstone for a generation’. Almost overnight the longhaired Fonda became the poster boy for America’s counter-culture.
The film also had a big impact on the movie industry, as studios temporarily abandoned big budget epics and went looking for directors who could tackle controversial subjects.
But Fonda, who worked as both actor and director, would struggle to emulate the success of Easy
Rider. Several of his films flopped, although the 1974 car chase cha caper Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry, in which he co-starred with Susan George, was a box-office hit.
The late 1990s saw a resurgence in his fortunes. In 1997 he starred in Ulee’s Gold as a beekeeper who tries to save his son and granddaughter from a life of drug abuse. His performance earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Actor.
His role in the 1999 TV movie The Passion Of Ayn Rand saw him win a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor.
Perhaps fittingly for someone once seen as America’s most famous hippie, he was a big critic of Donald Trump and frequently took to Twitter to lambast the President’s immigration policy.
He once wrote: ‘We should rip Barron Trump from his mother’s arms and put him in a cage with paedophiles.’
He later deleted the tweet and apologised for any offence caused.