“I never had an opportunity to do it”: the one genre that escaped Jane Fonda for over 60 years
Jane Fonda is, without question, Hollywood royalty. As the daughter of Academy Award winner and Golden Age of Hollywood star Henry Fonda, she was born under the spotlight. However, she still managed to surpass her father’s long shadow by creating a formidable legacy of her own. Fonda was part of the cohort of young Hollywood stars in the 1960s and ‘70s who turned the industry on its head by making bold, often provocative movies that dismissed the glamour of previous generations—including her father’s—in favour of grittier, more explicit, and often open-ended narratives that fit the cultural zeitgeist.
Early in her career, Fonda developed an image as a tough-as-nails sex symbol in movies like Cat Ballou, Barbarella, and Klute, but she quickly established herself as an actor with remarkable range. From Sydney Pollack’s period drama They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? to the French political drama Tout Va Bien, directed by Nouvelle Vague great Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, she made it clear that her career would be unpredictable and wide-ranging.
Fonda has continued to work steadily over the past six decades while holding down a prolific career as an activist, but somehow, despite having won two Oscars, an Emmy, multiple Golden Globes, and being nominated for a Grammy and two Tonys, she was only recently given the opportunity to act in an animated feature film.
In 2022, she starred in the Apple TV and Skydance movie Luck, playing (with smoke-puffing glory) a dragon named Babe. When discussing the film, Fonda revealed that it had been a long time coming. “I’ve wanted to do a voice in an animated feature film for a long time, and I never had an opportunity to do it,” she told an interviewer.
It’s hard to believe that an actor of her calibre and name recognition would have to wait so long for this kind of offer, especially considering that the cast lists of animated features are often so jam-packed with illustrious names that it almost seems like a role call of the most famous names in Hollywood. But perhaps some of the delay may have come down to timing. For Fonda, taking on the role was an ideal way to continue working during the Covid-19 pandemic. It’s hard to imagine the actor managing to fit it in during any other point in her packed filmography.
In Luck, Fonda plays a minor but critical role. The film centres on Sam (Eva Noblezada), a chronically unlucky person who teams up with a cat voiced by Simon Pegg to change her fortune. As Babe, Fonda is the CEO of Luck, who helps Sam turn things around and learns a valuable lesson about balance in the process. She is about 40 feet tall, bright red, and has long, swooping eyelashes. She might not have much time on screen, but thanks to Fonda’s unmistakable voice and obvious relish for the character, she steals every scene she appears in.
Fonda’s enthusiasm for the project wasn’t limited to the voice acting. According to director Peggy Holmes, the actor was deeply involved from the beginning, insisting on naming the character Babe and brainstorming the character’s personality. “She is curious, incredibly curious, and she wants to know and understand all the aspects that go into animation,” Holmes told an interviewer.
Adding: “We invited Jane into a story meeting, and we had the story artists actually pitch the sequences that the dragon was in so that Jane could kind of see how the whole story process goes and how we build a movie and animation.”
Although the film was released to little fanfare and received a shrug from critics, it deserves credit for finally giving Fonda her animated feature debut.
