The actors Jane Fonda admires most of all
As a screen icon with over six decades of Hollywood experience, Jane Fonda has seen it all. Having lived and worked through numerous movements, from the New Hollywood era to the modern streaming revolution, it would be easy to become jaded. However, this was far from the case in 2018, when she expressed as much enthusiasm for the industry as ever and took the opportunity to praise the three actors she admires most.
When journalist Gabriel Joseph-Dezaize asked, “Which actors do you most admire?” Fonda was quick with a typically thoughtful response. She said: “There is a group of actresses that I think are at the very top of brilliance: Meryl Streep, Annette Bening, Nicole Kidman. There are lots of others, but those are the ones I bow down to for their capacity to embody the human being they are portraying. It’s no longer acting. They become the person.”
Interestingly, Fonda isn’t just an admirer of Streep, who is widely regarded as the best actor of her generation. Fonda actually acted as a mentor for her during her nascent days in the movie business, as the two first met each other in the 1977 drama Julia. It was Streep’s screen debut, and she was incredibly nervous because all her scenes were opposite Fonda.
At an AFI Lifetime Achievement Award ceremony in 2014, Streep revealed that Fonda “had this almost feral alertness, like this bright blue attentiveness to everything that was around her that was completely intimidating – and made me feel like I was lumpy and from New Jersey, which I am.”
Amusingly, though, even though Fonda values an actor’s ability to get inside the heads of their characters, she also knows movie-making is a business, and actors are there to hit their marks. Streep confessed that she tried ad-libbing on her first day, going off-script and changing her movements. Fonda quickly – but politely – put the kibosh on that by telling the future superstar, “Look down. Over there, that green tape on the floor? That’s you. That’s your mark. And if you land on it, you will be in the light, and you will be in the movie.”
When it comes to her own roles, though, it’s obvious that Fonda loves the ones which required more of her than landing on the right piece of green tape. She gravitates to the ones that require a certain level of craft and a finely-honed ability to fully inhabit a character is something which fascinates her.
Joseph-Dezaize took the chance to ask which of her own parts she’s most proud of, and the Grace and Frankie star said, “I think Bree Daniels, in Klute, but also Gertie Nevels, in The Dollmaker, for which I won an Emmy. She was a hillbilly. She was as different from me as a human being can be. And I worked really hard to enter her reality. I’m very, very proud of that, as well as Klute.”
