The movie that transformed Jane Fonda’s career: “The only strategic thing I ever did”
During Jane Fonda’s career, which is still going strong after six decades in the movie business, the iconic star has seen and done it all. From Academy Awards glory to box office dominance to her fierce activism and a second career as a fitness guru, Fonda had lived several showbusiness lives within her 87 years.
However, one period sticks out like a sore thumb in Fonda’s career, and it was capped off by a film that transformed her career. Fascinatingly, though, she once admitted it was the only time she chose a role with cold, hard strategy in mind.
By 1990, Fonda had been a movie star for three decades. She rose to prominence in the ’60s with the likes of Barbarella, Barefoot in the Park, and Fun with Dick and Jane before becoming a two-time Oscar winner in the ’70s with Klute and Coming Home. In the ’80s, Jane Fonda’s Workout videos became huge sellers, and she continued to act in films such as On Golden Pond and The Morning After. However, toward the end of the decade, Fonda began to realise something was wrong – she had fallen out of love with acting.
“It totally disappeared for me as something I cared for or was passionate about,” Fonda admitted to Deadline in 2015. “I was 49 and I was really unhappy.” Indeed, Fonda had a lightning bolt moment when she was shooting 1990’s Stanley & Iris, a romantic drama that paired her with Robert De Niro.
That film was a box office disaster and didn’t fare much better with critics, but worse than that, Fonda found herself struggling to work up the enthusiasm to continue acting even while making the movie. “I sat on the edge of my hotel room bed and I was trying to envision a future for myself, and I couldn’t,” she confessed. “I thought, ‘I can’t keep doing this.’ I can’t act if I’m miserable, and so I thought, ‘Well, I’m just going to stop.'”
Amazingly, Fonda really did stop. In fact, she walked away from Hollywood for 15 long years, initially intending to become a full-time environmental activist. Instead, though, she married her third husband – CNN founder Ted Turner – in 1991, and after they divorced 10 years later, spent five years writing a memoir. As she put it, “It’s hard to know who you want to be if you don’t know who you’ve been.”
After 15 years away from the business, though, Fonda finally began to experience some embers of desire to return to acting. This was when she was offered a part in a romcom that was an almost guaranteed box office success and stood the chance of reintroducing the now 62-year-old star to an entirely new generation of moviegoers. The film was Monster-in-Law, a Jennifer Lopez vehicle directed by Legally Blonde’s Robert Luketic, and Fonda decided it was the perfect option to get her back in the game.
“Even though it was a popcorn movie, it was transformative for me in terms of my career,” Fonda admitted. “It was the only strategic career thing I ever did. I thought, ‘Hmm, people will come to see J Lo, and they will either rediscover me or if they’re young, they’ll discover Fonda,’ which is absolutely what happened.”
Indeed, in the 20 years since Monster-in-Law’s release, Fonda has worked regularly in film and television and seems to have rediscovered the love for acting that deserted her so completely in 1990. In fact, she credits her role as Leona Lansing in Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom for building on Monster-in-Law’s momentum and cementing her comeback. She smiled, “It was Aaron, bless his heart, giving me the role of Leona Lansing that kind of said, ‘She’s back.'”
