Here’s what the Internet wants to know about the legendary Oscar winner.
It feels like Jane Fonda is everywhere these days — but honestly, that has been a pretty evergreen statement for more than half a century.
Ever since making a splash in the late 1960s and early 1970s in films like Cat Ballou, Barbarella, and They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, the Hollywood legend has enjoyed enough acclaim and accolades to last several lifetimes. She’s won two Oscars (for Klute and Coming Home), an Emmy (for the TV movie The Dollmaker), and eight Golden Globes (which span from 1960 to 2021), all while championing political causes like women’s rights and climate change. In fact, she recently sat down with our very own Katie Couric at the Aspen Ideas Festival to talk about where our planet goes from here.
Considering she’s such a recognizable performer who’s had massive success across generations, it’s no surprise that Americans are constantly taking to Google to find out a little more about this screen icon. We researched the answers to the top questions about her life, career, and eternal fabulousness.
How old is Jane Fonda?
Today, Fonda is 86 years old. She was born Dec. 21, 1937, in New York City.
You already know all about her father, Henry Fonda — he’s a legendary actor in his own right who appeared in films like The Grapes of Wrath, 12 Angry Men, and On Golden Pond, which famously co-starred his daughter and Katharine Hepburn. That role won him the Oscar for Best Actor in 1981.
Fonda never had a particularly healthy relationship with her mother, the socialite Frances Ford Seymour, who died by suicide in 1950 (when Fonda was only 12) after years of struggling with mental illness. “They called it manic depression in those days, but now we say bipolarity,” Fonda recalled.
Now that Fonda has reached octogenarian status, she’s made it a part of her public identity (including starring in the 2023 comedy 80 for Brady), but she’s also done plenty of self-reflection about why aging is worth celebrating.
“I’m super-conscious that I’m closer to death. It doesn’t really bother me that much — what bothers me is that my body is basically not mine. My knees are not mine, my hips are not mine, my shoulder’s not mine,” she said in 2022. “[But] the fact that I’m still alive and working, wow! Who cares if I still don’t have my old joints and can’t ski or bike or run anymore? You know, you can be really old at 60, and really young at 85.”
What is Jane Fonda’s famous workout?
Depending on how old you are, there may have been a time when exercise was the primary reason you knew of Fonda. Her exercise book and tapes became a smash sensation in the 1980s, revolutionizing her career and the at-home workout market.
Fonda has said that before her aerobic, strength, and flexibility workout became the cultural moment it did, it was initially just something for herself: “I was doing the workout before I started the business, and it gave me back a sense of control over my body,” she recalled.
She eventually did turn it into a business, and what a business it was — but the decision came with deeper aspirations than adding to her own personal fortune.
Piggybacking off Fonda’s activism around the Vietnam War, she and her husband Tom Hayden started a group called the Campaign for Economic Democracy. It was meaningful work, but it soon became difficult to raise the money the organization needed to function.
“Tom and I sat down and said, ‘Why don’t we start a business to fund the political work?’ That was the workout. It was owned by the political organization and raised $17 million,” Fonda said.
She admitted that she did have fears about how becoming a fitness maven might affect her career as an actress, but she said those anxieties were calmed as soon as she began to get feedback about her tapes.
“The minute I started doing it, I started hearing from women,” she said. “Women would say, ‘I don’t take sleeping pills anymore. I haven’t had to take insulin. I can stand up to my boss.’ And I realized it was about more than the shape of one’s body. It was empowerment.”
Has Jane Fonda been arrested?
She has — many times, actually.
The first came on Nov. 3, 1970, when she landed at an airport in Ohio after giving an anti-war speech about Vietnam during a trip to Canada. Later reports indicated the directive for her arrest came from the Nixon White House, which had been watching her for months (and even tapping her phone) because of their distaste for the content of her political activism. When airport officials demanded to search her luggage, they found bottles of vitamins that they claimed could be illegal drugs, and they put Fonda into a jail cell for 10 hours.
Ultimately, all the charges were dropped. But a symbol of that arrest endures to this day: Fonda’s iconic mugshot, featuring a raised fist and the popular haircut she sported in 1971’s Klute, remains so popular that Fonda still sells T-shirts, pins, and mugs bearing the image. (All of the proceeds go to the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Power and Potential.)
Then, many years later, Fonda made getting arrested a regular habit. She was handcuffed five times in 2019 during her “Fire Drill Fridays” campaign, which shed light on the urgent need to address climate change. Fonda and a handful of famous friends (including the likes of Catherine Keener, Ted Danson, and her Grace & Frankie co-star Lily Tomlin) would protest on Capitol Hill before being taken in by police for occupying the building. Each time it happened, national media seized on the story of recognizable celebrities having an encounter with the law, which only helped to spotlight Fonda’s mission.
“Why be a celebrity if you can’t leverage it for something that is this important?” she said.
Though she’s given up being arrested for protesting for the time being, Fonda is still serious about the cause. She launched the Jane Fonda Climate PAC to continue organizing and fighting for change.
Why is Jane Fonda called “Hanoi Jane”?
Someone as famous and politically minded as Fonda is sure to cause some commotion from time to time, and this incident is one that has followed her for decades.
The nickname dates back to the 1970s, when Fonda was a prominent critic of the Vietnam War. During a 1972 trip to Hanoi, the country’s capital, she appeared on several radio programs criticizing American military policy, met with prisoners of war, and infamously posed for photos on an anti-aircraft gun. Those images were widely seen around the world, and they were interpreted as Fonda saying she supported U.S. aircraft being shot down.
In her 2006 memoir My Life So Far, Fonda wrote that she recalls being led over to the gun and sitting on it without realizing what, exactly, she was sitting on until it was too late.
“As I start to walk back to the car with the translator, the implication of what has just happened hits me. Oh, my God. It’s going to look like I was trying to shoot down U.S. planes!” she wrote. “I plead with him, ‘You have to be sure those photographs are not published. Please, you can’t let them be published.’ I am assured it will be taken care of. I don’t know what else to do. It is possible that the Vietnamese had it all planned. I will never know.”
She added that she ultimately takes responsibility for the photographs, which she said she’s paid a “heavy price” for. She was deeply criticized, called a traitor, and stamped with the “Hanoi Jane” moniker that people still know today.
In 2011, Fonda penned a lengthy essay about the “Hanoi Jane” scandal on her website, in which she said taking those photographs is the “one thing that happened while in North Vietnam that I will regret to my dying day.”
She added, however, that she doesn’t regret speaking out against a war she didn’t believe in — and she laments the fact that the circulation of not only those photos but also untrue stories (such as the claim that she encouraged Vietnamese guards to torture American POWs) obscured the nuances of her viewpoint.
“These lies have circulated for almost forty years, continually reopening the wound of the Vietnam War and causing pain to families of American servicemen,” Fonda wrote. “The lies distort the truth of why I went to North Vietnam and they perpetuate the myth that being anti-war means being anti-soldier.”
How much money did Jane Fonda get from her ex-husband Ted Turner?
Fonda has been married three times: Her first husband was French screenwriter Roger Vadim, a union that lasted from 1965 to 1973. She wed political activist Tom Hayden in 1973, and they divorced in 1990. But her most famous mate was media tycoon Ted Turner, to whom she was married from 1991 to 2001.
If you know anything about Turner, it’s probably that he’s very, very wealthy. He founded CNN in 1980, and he also launched the network that would ultimately become TBS. As of 2023, Forbes estimates his net worth at $2.4 billion, so it’s no surprise that followers of Fonda would be curious about whether she got a piece of that pie upon their divorce.
The answer is that she did. Media reports have put the sum of Fonda’s divorce settlement in the ballpark of $40 million. Turner told The Hollywood Reporter in 2012 that though the breakup was difficult for him, he had no choice but to let go after writing that check. “I couldn’t do anything else,” he said. “What am I supposed to do, sit down and cry? I did for six months. And after that, you gotta go on.”
Fonda took a hiatus from acting during their marriage, appearing in no films between 1990’s Stanley & Iris and her 2005 comeback Monster-in-Law. While on the press circuit earlier this year for 80 for Brady, she said she wasn’t sure she would ever act again while she was with Turner.
“I left for 15 years when I married Ted Turner, and I did not think I was gonna come back, ’cause when I married him, I thought it’d be forever,” she said. “But I came back, and frankly, if anybody told me that at 85, I’d be doing this kind of movie, I would have not believed them. So I feel very lucky.”
How many children does Jane Fonda have?
She has a total of three kids, all of whom joined the family during different periods. Here’s the rundown on who they are.
Fonda’s first child is Vanessa Vadim, who was born in 1968. Her father is Roger Vadim, the French filmmaker who Fonda divorced in 1973, only a few years after their child was born. She’s taken after her mother in terms of activism, which has included getting arrested herself during Fire Drill Fridays.
After her split from Ted Turner, Fonda told Oprah that Vanessa had welcomed her into her home when she needed a place to stay, which also helped to enrich their relationship: “Intuitively, Vanessa has always known my strength — and she has always seen me give it up for a man. It has made her very angry, which is one reason it’s great that I’m here with her. She knows that I’m getting my voice back,” Fonda said.
In 1973, Fonda gave birth to her son, Troy Garity. His father is her second husband, Tom Hayden, and though Troy doesn’t share his dad’s surname, “Garity” is a Hayden family name that the couple chose. Garity followed in his mother’s footsteps professionally — he’s an actor who has appeared in TV series including Ballers and Magnum P.I. and films like the Barbershop franchise. In 2004, he received a Golden Globe nomination for best actor in a miniseries or TV movie for his role in the Showtime movie Solider’s Girl.
Fonda’s third child is Mary Luana Williams, who wasn’t born to Fonda biologically but joined the family later in life. Known as Lulu, Williams was born in Oakland, California, and was a beloved student at Fonda’s performing arts camp. But one summer, she didn’t show up — and when she came back the next summer, “she was a different person,” Fonda recalled. The reason was that Williams had been sexually assaulted, and with the knowledge Fonda had about Williams’s challenging family background, she feared Williams would never recover unless she could be removed from her environment. Fonda told Williams that if she got her grades up at school, she could come to live with Fonda and her family — and that’s exactly what happened.
“There was no intellectual thought process about it — it was all very instinctual,” Williams said about her decision to accept Fonda’s offer. “And I didn’t really know [Fonda]. I could have gone into a situation where she was a horrible person when I got there. But that’s how desperate I was. I didn’t care. Anything had to be better than where I was.”
Does Jane Fonda have cancer?
In September 2022, Fonda shared heartbreaking news on her Instagram account: “I’ve been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and have started chemo treatments,” she wrote. “This is a very treatable cancer. 80% of people survive, so I feel very lucky.”
In true Fonda fashion, she used this personal announcement as an opportunity to spotlight inequality and make a point about how national politics can influence individuals’ health. She remarked on the “painful” realization that her privilege in accessing the best doctors (with top-notch health insurance) sets her apart from the average American family, and she also commented on the connection some research has shown between fossil fuel emissions and cancer risk.
But this story has a happy ending: In December 2022, days before her 85th birthday, Fonda posted an elated blog on her website sharing the news that she was in remission and her oncologist had officially allowed her to discontinue chemotherapy. She said that her most recent treatment had affected her significantly and made it “hard to accomplish much of anything,” but she was focused on the positive.
“I am feeling so blessed, so fortunate,” she said. “I thank all of you who prayed and sent good thoughts my way. I am confident that it played a role in the good news.”
