Jane Fonda

Jane Fonda is an American actress, fitness mogul, and political activist whose six-decade career has produced two Best Actress Oscars and one of the most-iconic celebrity-activism arcs in American cultural history. She was born Lady Jayne Seymour Fonda on December 21, 1937, in New York City, the daughter of acclaimed American actor Henry Fonda and Frances Ford Seymour. Her brother Peter Fonda also became an actor; her niece Bridget Fonda is also an actor. Her mother died by suicide when Jane was 12. She attended Vassar College briefly before moving to Paris and then back to New York to study acting under Lee Strasberg.

Her film career began in 1960 and her early roles in light comedies (Sunday in New York 1963, Cat Ballou 1965) and Roger Vadim's Barbarella (1968) established her as a 1960s sex symbol. The transition to serious dramatic work came with Sydney Pollack's They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969, her first Best Actress Oscar nomination), Klute (1971, Best Actress Oscar), and Coming Home (1978, second Best Actress Oscar).

Her parallel political career was defined by her opposition to the Vietnam War. The 1972 photograph of her sitting on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun — for which the American press derisively dubbed her "Hanoi Jane" — became one of the most-controversial American celebrity-activist images of the 20th century, an image she has publicly addressed and apologized for repeatedly across subsequent decades. Her continued activism has spanned women's rights, environmental causes, and LGBTQ rights.

Her 1980s second-act commercial peak was the Jane Fonda's Workout (1982) — the bestselling VHS tape in history at its commercial peak, with over 17 million copies sold worldwide — and the subsequent series of 22 fitness videos through the 1990s. Her late-career television comeback came with Netflix's Grace and Frankie (2015–2022, opposite Lily Tomlin), which became one of Netflix's longest-running original series. She received the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2014 and the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the 2021 Golden Globes. She has continued to act and engage in climate activism into her eighties, including her recurring 2019–2020 "Fire Drill Fridays" Capitol Hill arrests.

Her name Jane is the English form of the Old French Jeanne, the feminine of Jean (the French form of John, from the Hebrew Yochanan meaning "Yahweh is gracious"). Jane has been continuously among the most-popular American girls' names for over a century.