Jane Fonda reveals the seminal moment of her career: “A very tumultuous time”
Few people who have ever been involved in the movie business come across as well-balanced as Jane Fonda. As the daughter of the legendary Henry Fonda, Jane could easily have leveraged her position for personal gain but has spent most of her time in the limelight promoting good causes. Fonda has put her weight behind campaigns for women’s rights, peace, the environment, the LGBTQ+ community, and Native Americans. When history looks back on her life, it will be clear that she was on the right side.
Alongside all this great stuff away from the camera, Fonda is also an extremely talented actor. She’s a two-time Oscar winner, having proven herself capable in drama, comedy, and everything in between. Even in her late 80s, she continues to make regular movie appearances and rabble-rousing speeches at awards shows.
It all started for the icon in the 1960s. Fonda broke through with the comedy western Cat Ballou before moving on to the likes of Barbarella and Klute, for which she won her first Academy Award. According to the woman herself, things really kicked into overdrive when she was visited by one of the great directors of the age: Sydney Pollack.
“The first really seminal moment was when he came to my rented house,” she told The Guardian. The reason for Pollack’s visit was to propose a joint venture, an adaptation of the Horace McCoy novel They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? “He sat down and said, ‘I want you to read the book and I want you to tell me what you think are the key elements in it that need to be brought out in the film,’” Fonda recalled.
Adding: “Doesn’t seem like a big thing to you, maybe, but nobody had ever asked me to really participate in the content of a movie that I was in before.”
This was a big career crossroads for Fonda. They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? is a dark drama set during the Great Depression, centring on the lives of a group of young people taking part in marathon dancing sessions to stave off boredom. Fonda’s previous film, by comparison, was Barbarella, an erotic sci-fi adventure in which the star spends most of the runtime in a bikini.
“It was a very tumultuous time, a time of a lot of change,” she reflected. “I was also morphing from a noun into a verb. And the movie of They Shoot Horses was kind of the beginning of my being a verb. And the fact that Sydney asked me what I thought was part of that process. It’s very important to me – I work with young people now, and I learned from that experience with Sydney the importance of asking children’s opinions and really listening to them”.
Adding, “At any rate, it was the first time I’d done a movie that was relevant to what was happening in the world. The marathon dances of the Depression were a metaphor for American consumer society that was killing our souls, and I’d never done anything like that before.”
This was the beginning of Fonda’s turn as a dramatic actor. She earned her first Oscar nomination and, more importantly, opened people’s eyes to her potential. It’s safe to say that she never looked back from that moment on.
