“I’m so scared that it’s titillating”: the Oscar-winning 1988 movie Jane Fonda refused to star in
Regardless of the adverse effects it could have on her career, Jane Fonda always refused to compromise her principles, even when it put her in the crosshairs of the industry’s most powerful figures.
Her stance against the Vietnam War came perilously close to putting her on Hollywood’s permanent blacklist, and she made several high-profile enemies along the way, with John Wayne and the United States government being just two of them.
The two-time Academy Award winner has always been outspoken on the highs and lows of her career, along with the sexism and misogyny she faced along the way, and when she realised that there weren’t any worthwhile roles available for a woman of her age in the 1990s, she took a 15-year sabbatical.
Not too long before Stanley & Iris sent her into self-imposed exile for the next decade and a half, Fonda had been sent Tom Topor’s script for The Accused, with the part of lawyer Katheryn Murphy hers if she wanted it. However, despite her feminist principles and status as one of the industry’s leading advocates for women, the second-generation star didn’t necessarily trust the filmmakers to get it right.
“There are certain things that I won’t do; there’s a level of violence that I won’t go past,” she explained at the time. “I have a script that I haven’t said yes or no to, it’s loosely based on the rape that took place in Boston. It’s about an important issue of our people, but in the process of getting there, you see the rape, and you hear what they’re saying, and I’m so scared that it’s titillating.”
“I’m so scared that it’s going to encourage that,” Fonda continued. “I think I’m going to have to say no, even though, ultimately, the message is an important one. Now, if I was starting out, you’d better believe I’d do it, I would try to persuade the people in charge to minimise.” She wasn’t convinced that The Accused would be reflective of that, so she ultimately passed on the part.
The role was played by Kelly McGillis, and Jodie Foster had her reservations about leading the film, too, although she ended up winning a ‘Best Actress’ Oscar for her powerful performance. It says a lot about the industry and the way it told those stories in the ’80s that Fonda was fully aware of the importance of the message, yet remained unconvinced that it would be dealt with in a satisfactory manner.
Given the subject matter, The Accused was controversial at the time, and having been written by a man and directed by a man, as much as Fonda knew that “a big part of the audience is going to be women” and she knew that “you’re going to serve the film better if we find a way to say this in a way that’s not titillating, that will be respected,” she didn’t have enough confidence in that happening to commit.
It was an understandable reason for refusing to play a part that carried such emotional, thematic, and narrative weight, and who knows, Foster may not have been The Accused‘s only Oscar-nominated cast member had Fonda agreed to star.
