The only performances Jane Fonda went method
Jane Fonda’s career has spanned several phases of Hollywood, and if you factor in her famous father’s career as well, she was born with nearly the entire sweep of cinema in her blood. She took to the new guard of Hollywood early in her career, appearing in the western satire Cat Ballou in 1965 and Arthur Penn’s gritty crime thriller The Chase alongside Marlon Brando and Robert Redford a year later.
Despite being cast initially in coquettish, sex-symbol roles throughout the 1960s, Fonda earned her stripes as a respected dramatic actor in the ‘70s, garnering four Academy Award nominations within the decade and winning two. Her performances as a sex worker in Alan J Pakula’s thriller Klute and as a woman who has an affair with a wounded Vietnam veteran in Coming Home were at opposite ends of the dramatic spectrum.
In the first, she plays a streetwise woman with a tough exterior who has to confront her hidden vulnerabilities. In the latter, she plays a traditional, soft-spoken housewife who undergoes a political transformation. Both films won her an Oscar, and both demonstrated her remarkable range as an actor.
When speaking to The New Yorker in 2018, Fonda talked about her process as a performer. Having begun her career around the time that method acting was taking hold, she fit squarely within the cohort of young performers who took up the technique like a religion. But according to Fonda, she only went method “just a few times” throughout her career.
“Oftentimes during Klute, for example, a few times in Coming Home—the two films that I’ve won an Oscar for,” she revealed. “A few times in Book Club strangely enough. A few times in Our Souls at Night, recently.
The first two are not surprising. Fonda did extensive research for Klute in order to avoid the usual stereotypes of sex workers. She interviewed women who were currently in the profession, and later told The Guardian that it was the first film where she felt like there was a “marriage” between her and her character.
Coming Home was a deeply personal movie for Fonda. As one of the country’s most prominent anti-Vietnam War activists, she had wanted to make a movie about the conflict. She produced the project and based the character of the wounded soldier on her friend and fellow activist, Ron Kovic. It’s easy to see how she might have mined the depths of her emotional connection to the story for her performance.
Our Souls at Night and Book Club are much more surprising. For one thing, they were both made in the latter part of the 2010s, four decades after Klute and Coming Home. For another, they aren’t exactly heavy-hitting dramas. Our Souls at Night is a gentle twilight years drama about two elderly neighbours, Fonda and Robert Redford, who forge a friendship late in life. Book Club is a star-studded comedy about four women in their seventies who undergo a sexual reawakening after reading 50 Shades of Grey in their book group. It’s probably best not to ask how Fonda went method for that one.
