Fonda, Jane (1937–)

Jane Seymour Fonda was born in New York City on December 21, 1937, the first of two children born to actor Henry Fonda and Frances Seymour Brokaw. A two-time Academy Award–winning actress, Jane Fonda became an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War in the 1970s.

Fonda spent her childhood in Los Angeles and Greenwich, Connecticut. She graduated from the Emma Willard School in Troy, New York, in 1955 and entered Vassar College that fall. She left college after 2 years and studied acting, making her first film appearance in Tall Story in 1960. Fonda lived in Paris from 1963 to 1969, marrying film director Roger Vadim in 1964, and there began reading about the American civil rights movement and growing opposition to the war in Vietnam. On her return to the United States, she engaged more actively in leftist politics, marching with Native American activists and befriending several Black Panthers. Fonda's celebrity drew media attention to these causes, and she frequently lobbied wealthy friends for donations.

Fonda's most memorable activism focused on the war in Vietnam. She made her first speech to an antiwar rally in May 1970 and was a staunch supporter of opposition groups like the U.S. Servicemen's Fund and Vietnam Veterans Against the War. In 1971, she assembled a group of like-minded actors, including Peter Boyle and Dick Gregory, to form an anti-war alternative to the USO called Free the Army.

Fonda traveled to Vietnam in July 1972, where she recorded several programs for Radio Hanoi and met with American prisoners of war. She was also photographed sitting in a North Vietnamese weapon used to shoot down American planes. These images, as well as rumors that American soldiers were beaten into attending her press conference, earned Fonda the enmity of many Vietnam veterans and the enduring nickname “Hanoi Jane.”

Fonda's activism continued after the war ended. She divorced Vadim and married Tom Hayden, cofounder of Students for a Democratic Society, in 1973. She and Hayden lectured widely on Vietnam as well as environmentalism, apartheid, and other issues. Fonda also helped pay for Hayden's successful campaign for the California State Assembly in 1982.

Divorced from Hayden by the end of the 1980s, Fonda continued to be concerned with political and environmental causes. She married media mogul Ted Turner in 1991 (they divorced in 2001) and founded the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention in 1995. The actress also endowed the Jane Fonda Center at the Emory University School of Medicine in 2001 to research issues in women's and adolescent health. The controversy that Jane Fonda's engagement with the anti-war movement continues to generate reflects America's larger dilemma with the purposes and outcome of that war. Many of its leaders have come to question its efficacy, but for others, the image of the traitorous Hanoi Jane lives on.