The movie Jane Fonda says “ignited my passion for storytelling”
In a bizarre scenario that could only unfold in the world of celebrity, Jane Fonda once named the movie that first instilled in her a passion for storytelling, only to discover later on in life that, for a spell, she wasn’t even the biggest fan of it in her own home.
Any doubts that Fonda had the chops to step out of her legendary father Henry’s shadow were quickly silenced when she rapidly emerged as one of the finest actors in the industry. It even reached the point where it didn’t take her long to be tagged as a generational talent in her own right.
Fonda made her screen debut in 1960’s Tall Story, and by the end of the following decade she’d won two Academy Awards from five nominations, scooped a pair of Golden Globes from a quintet of nods, and become the face of Hollywood rebellion after disregarding advice to protect her career when she became just as well-known for her outspoken activism as she was for her work in front of the camera.
Her father was a towering presence in film who starred in a litany of classics, so there was really no other path for Fonda to follow other than the performing arts given the way acting had already been part of her life since the very beginning. Something still needed to open her eyes to the potential of the medium, though, and it came through her first time watching one of the all-time greats.
“I remember watching Gone with the Wind with my father when I was a little girl,” she wrote in her autobiography My Life So Far. “It was one of those films that had a big impact on me, and ignited my passion for storytelling.” She was already a huge fan, then, but that was dwarfed when she married her third husband, Ted Turner, in 1991.
As she recalled, his love of Victor Fleming’s awards-laden and record-breakingly lucrative epic bordered on obsession, to such an extent that he spent $1.5billion just to call it his own. “Ted bought MGM so he could own Gone With the Wind,” she told the New York Times. “I mean, Gone With the Wind, he lives by that. ‘The land is the only thing that matters, Scarlett. The land is the only thing that lasts!’. That’s why he owns two million acres, because of Scarlett O’Hara.”
When Gone with the Wind finally premiered in Russia more than half a century on from its release in 1990, it was sponsored by Turner, who brought then-partner Fonda along to the Moscow premiere. According to Fonda, “he recited lines from Gone with the Wind a lot” during their time together, making her eye-opening first encounter with the movie pale in comparison to his all-consuming need to make it a key part of his personality.
