Jane Fonda has never slowed down. At 87, the actor and activist is still leading from the front — on the red carpet, while embarking on climate change or social justice activism, and as a champion for women. We were thrilled to have Jane grace the cover our our July issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly. Read on for our interview with the iconic actor and activist.
Content Warning: This article touches on the topics of mental health issues, suicide, and eating disorders, which may be triggering for some readers.
In the month before we meet, Jane Fonda has hiked through the Amazon Rainforest, addressed the United Nations on ocean conservation, launched a renewable energy campaign, and walked the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival. More than ever, there seems to be an energy and an urgency to her life.
“I’m a very determined person,” she admits, and she laughs – a wonderful, warm, generous laugh.
She’s also happy. “I’m pretty much happy all the time,” she tells The Weekly, and she means it, “because I’m doing what I love.” That might be picketing the Pentagon, spending time with her grandchildren (Malcolm and Viva) or developing new films. And she understands that, at 87, it is a blessing to have so very many choices.
Jane Fonda on championing women in film
Tonight, in Cannes, dressed in floor-length, body-hugging white, Jane will join a glittering guest list (including Helen Mirren, Viola Davis, Elle Fanning and Andie MacDowell) to celebrate the achievements of emerging women filmmakers at the L’Oreal Paris Lights on Women’s Worth Award. It is the short film award’s fifth year, and Jane has been a supporter since the beginning. It’s a cause that resonates deeply with her.
“I made my first movie in 1959,” she explains. It was called Tall Story, and she played a cheerleader. “All through the early parts of my career, there were no women anywhere on the set. Maybe the continuity – the script girl – maybe she was a woman, but that was all, and it was very lonely.”
Which perhaps explains why she reached out to a young Meryl Streep when she met her, back in 1976, on the set of Julia. It was Meryl’s first movie, and she was in awe of the film’s two stars, iconic British actor Vanessa Redgrave and Jane.
“They called me to the set and I met Jane Fonda for the first time,” Meryl recounted on the night of Jane’s American Film Institute Lifetime Achievement Award. “She had an almost feral alertness, like this bright blue attentiveness to everything around her, which was completely intimidating and made me feel like I was lumpy and from New Jersey, which I am.”
How Jane Fonda showed Meryl Streep the ropes
But then rehearsal began, and Jane quietly showed Meryl the ropes, including where to stand on the set so the camera could find her.
“After we wrapped that movie, I found out she’d gone back to California and told everybody who would listen about this girl with a weird last name, and opened more doors than I probably even know about today.”
Then, turning to Jane, Meryl added, “I have so much to thank you for. Because these are your signal characteristics, as an actor and a woman: your presentness – you really are right here – and your generous heart. So I thank you for that … And all the young actors I’ve worked with thank you too, because that lesson gets passed down, and it does keep going.”
Back in 1976, that gesture of support and solidarity was rare enough among women to be noticed and treasured and commented on.
“Today,” Jane tells The Weekly, “I think women’s support for other women is becoming quite intentional. We realise that it’s important and we do it, and it’s quite common. It didn’t used to be. It’s one of the really wonderful developments.”
She is demure about the path she’s hewn for younger women in the industry and doesn’t much like to be called a trailblazer. But in 1972, Jane formed her own production company, IPC, with a friend from the anti-war movement, Bruce Gilbert. They proceeded to make a string of brilliant, uncompromising movies with strong, honest portrayals of women at their heart.
How Jane Fonda combined activism with acting projects
At the time, Jane was a passionate opponent of the Vietnam War and, “I can’t say I was blacklisted but I was graylisted,” she told The New York Times. She was also “disillusioned by the exploitative quality of the few offers I was getting”. IPC (named after the Indochina Peace Campaign) let Jane take control of the narrative.
A string of movies came in quick succession and made the production house’s name. The message was always central, but she says now, “I also had a lot of fun making them”.
Coming Home (1978) examined the lives of a broken army veteran and his wife. It won Academy Awards for Best Actor (Jon Voigt) and Best Actress (Jane) and was nominated for Best Picture. The China Syndrome (1979), a shattering political thriller set in a nuclear reactor, was released, presciently, just weeks before the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in Pennsylvania. 9 to 5 (1980) was a screwball comedy on the theme of misogyny in the office, and it was where Jane first worked with lifelong friends Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton. It took her a year to persuade them both to be involved.
Then there was On Golden Pond (1981). It earned Academy Awards for both its stars, Kathryn Hepburn and Henry Fonda. But most importantly, it was an opportunity for Jane to reconcile with her father. She knew he was unwell, that he was unlikely to survive. The film gave her a chance to say things to him, in character, that she had longed to say all her life. He died five months after it wrapped.
Jane Fonda’s family and backstory
Jane was born on 21 December 1937 in New York City. Henry Fonda was already a respected name in the film industry, but he was emotionally (and often physically) distant. Her mother, Frances Ford Seymour, a Canadian, was beautiful, enchanting, but deeply vulnerable.
Jane’s father was not faithful, and when Jane was 12, he asked her mother for a divorce. “She was absolutely wonderful … She accepted it,” he wrote in his autobiography. But the reality at home was very different. Frances was admitted to a mental health facility and died by suicide within months.
Jane was told her mother had died of a heart attack. However, she eventually learned that Frances suffered from bipolar disorder. It would take the best part of 50 years for Jane to come to terms with Frances’ life and death.
As a child, she was afraid of her mother’s vulnerability, she explains in the documentary Jane Fonda in Five Acts. “My team was the winning team.” That was her father, and she wanted to please him. “What do you want me to be? I’ll be that.”
Her battles with an eating disorder
After her mother’s death, she was sent away to boarding school, which felt stable and steady, and where she excelled academically but also developed an eating disorder.
She worried that her father thought she was overweight and that she embarrassed him. “I didn’t like my body, I didn’t like myself,” she said. “I heard my father say things about my body that have twisted my life in deep ways ever since.”
It is important to recount all this because, when Jane says that she’s worked hard to find a place of inner happiness and equanimity at 87, it seems right to acknowledge that it’s been hard won. It hasn’t come without a fight.
Jane didn’t go into acting right away. She studied art in Paris and still speaks French with a beautiful accent. Then she studied acting with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio in New York.
Jane Fonda on her acting…and love life
When she began to work in film, Jane was sensational. She starred in a string of 60s classics, including the comedic western, Cat Ballou (1965), and alongside Robert Redford in Barefoot in the Park (1967). Filming the latter, she told Vanity Fair, was “a totally delightful experience because I fell in love with Bob Redford. I mean, we were both married and nothing came of it, of course, but I had such a crush on him that just going to work every day was stepping into paradise.”
Jane had married her first husband, the French filmmaker Roger Vadim, in 1965. They’d met at Maxim’s restaurant in Paris. “He walked in and I immediately felt endangered,” she said.
“He felt predatory. But charming, sexy.”
She wore a white minidress and black go-go boots at their wedding. And promised herself she would never work with him.
Of course, she did, in the sci-fi hit Barbarella. She has described this as the most difficult on-set experience of her life. Still suffering from bouts of bulimia, anorexia and body dysmorphia, she got drunk to take her clothes off for the title sequence.
Jane Fonda’s children
She and Roger had a daughter, Vanessa, but Jane left him in 1970 and returned to America, where she earned a reputation as someone who could pour her soul into truly challenging dramatic roles.
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (which she made in the final days of her marriage to Roger) earned Jane her first Academy Award nomination. It was also the first time she’d made a film that she felt “had something to say about American society that mattered”, and she liked that. Two years later, for Klute, she threw herself wholeheartedly into the role of a high-class prostitute and won the Oscar for Best Actress.
There would be a great many more awards and two more husbands (Tom Hayden, an activist, and Ted Turner, entrepreneur and founder of CNN) before Jane would reach that place of equanimity.
There would also be two more children. Troy was conceived in a motorhome while Jane and Tom were driving around the country on an anti-war tour. Mary ‘Lulu’ Williams, the daughter of two Black Panther activists, was unofficially adopted by Jane in her teens.
“It all goes back to my mother’s childhood,” Troy postulated in the documentary. “I think her light was almost put out when she was a child. So I think she likes to find people who are in danger of losing theirs and rekindle it. Mum was not orphaned but pretty damn close.”
How Jane Fonda embraces her age
Jane Fonda tosses her mane of salt and pepper hair and says she’s finally found a haircut she’s happy with – and a shampoo, L’Oreal Paris, of course. When she hooked up with the cosmetics giant in 2006 to launch its Age Perfect range, that too was revolutionary. Isabella Rossellini had been given the boot by Lancome ten years earlier, at just 40, and the age-positive trend in fashion was still nascent at best.
“Any healthy country, like any healthy individual, should be in perpetual revolution,” Jane had said back in the 70s. And here she was, at 69, quite literally changing the face of society again.
She does look extraordinary. And she moves with grace and confidence, though she admits that tripping on a red carpet is an abiding fear. “Terrifying.”
She has been a fitness icon to generations of women. When we interviewed her trainer, Malin Svensson, she likened Jane taking her on to the Dalai Lama hiring a spiritual teacher. Her “Jane Fonda’s Workout” videos kick-started the fitness boom of the 80s and sold 17 million copies, all profits from which were channelled into an activist organisation.
How Jane exercises for her lifestyle
Jane made the videos to fund campaigns, but almost as an afterthought, physical fitness changed her life. It raised her self-esteem and helped her to put disordered eating behind her. She still swears by her workout routine, though it’s changed somewhat since 1982.
“I’ve realised that exercising, in a way, is even more important when you’re older,” she tells The Weekly. “You really notice the effects if you have not maintained strength. For example, getting out of a car requires strong thighs, and if you haven’t kept your thighs strong, it’s hard to get in and out. Or reaching for something, or carrying your grandchild. You have to keep your muscles strong.”
“The huge difference now, compared to when I was younger, is that I exercise more slowly,” she adds, with a mischievous wink. “Kind of like sex – slow. Everything is better when it’s slower. So I do many of the same exercises, but I do them slowly.
“I also do them more correctly. When you’re older, doing it correctly is important because otherwise you’re going to hurt yourself.”
Jane Fonda on her mental health and well-being
Jane is conscious of her emotional well-being, too. Not long after she turned 60, she began a gradual review of her life, which culminated in her autobiography, My Life So Far.
“I wasn’t very happy with myself, and so I changed,” she tells The Weekly. “And I’ve changed for the better.” Central to the process was understanding her parents and the impact they’d had on her life. But she also did some deep thinking and learned some hard truths about her own role as a mother. She says she wrote her book because she wanted her daughter to understand why she wasn’t “a better parent”.
Katherine Hepburn once said to Jane, “I’ve learnt more from my failures,” and she has taken that on board.
Looking back over her life, the time, she says, when she has felt the most confident and comfortable in her own skin is now.
“If you’ve lived correctly, that’s the way it’s supposed to be,” she insists. “I’ve spent a lot of my life trying to make myself better. All I can say now is that it’s a wonderful thing when your happiness doesn’t depend on what happens.”
That transformation didn’t happen overnight. There have been years of “meditation, therapy, analysis, spending time in nature – all these kinds of things allow you to grow as a human being.”
Her cancer battle and the friendships that supported her
These are all practices that supported her, alongside the very best of science-based medicine, through two bouts with cancer. The first was breast cancer in 2010, “which was treated,” she wrote in Time, “with radiation and then a full mastectomy”. Then, in September 2022, Jane went through four months of chemotherapy for non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, before it went into remission.
She has also felt supported by friendship, especially her women friends who include Grace and Frankie co-star Lily Tomlin, Sally Field and her late “bestie”, Paula Weinstein.
“I don’t even know what I would do without my women friends,” she told another dear friend, media executive Pat Mitchell, back in 2015. “I have my friends, therefore I am; I exist because I have my women friends. They make me stronger, they make me smarter, they make me braver, they tap me on the shoulder when I might be in need of course correcting … I find I shed tears a lot with my intimate friends, not because I’m sad but because I’m so touched and inspired by them.”
Jane Fonda on climate activism
By the time you read this, Jane will be winging her way to Australia, where she’s aware we’ve seen unprecedented floods and drought this year. In California, where she lives, she knows people whose lives are still affected by the devastating January fires.
Jane’s home was thankfully safe, but the fires have “deepened my commitment to act on climate change”. Still, at 87, she is at the barricades.
“Once you understand what’s happening,” she says, and light flashes in those wide, blue eyes, “you have to do something.”
“She is not a fly-by-night activist,” her dear friend Paula Weinstein once said. “It is deep in her soul.”
This article originally appeared in the July 2025 issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly. SUBSCRIBE so you never miss an issue!
