Jane Fonda
The Private Life of a Public Woman
-
-
3.6 • 9 Ratings
-
-
- $14.99
-
- $14.99
Publisher Description
“The definitive portrait of a woman conflicted, torn between ferocious ambition, family, and feminist causes” (Gail Sheehy, author of Passages).
Jane Fonda emerged from a heartbreaking Hollywood family drama to become a ’60s onscreen ingénue and then an Oscar-winning actress. At the top of her game she risked it all, speaking out against the Vietnam War and shocking the world with a trip to Hanoi. One of Hollywood’s most committed feminists, she financed her husband Tom Hayden’s political career in the ’80s with a series of exercise videos that sparked a nationwide fitness craze. Even more surprising was Fonda’s next turn, as a Stepford Wife of the Gulfstream set, marrying Ted Turner and seemingly walking away from her ideals and her career.
Patricia Bosworth goes behind the image of an American superwoman, revealing the real Jane Fonda—more powerful and vulnerable than we ever expected—whose struggles for high achievement, love, and motherhood mirror the conflicts of an entire generation of women. In the hands of this seasoned, tenacious biographer, the evolution of one of the world’s most controversial and successful women becomes nothing less than a great, enthralling American life.
“A book that gets unusually close to its subject. It sees what Ms. Fonda cannot see about herself.” —The New York Times
“Bosworth’s thorough account of this wild, uniquely twentieth-century Hollywood life makes Jane Fonda the actress even more intriguing.” —San Francisco Chronicle
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Years after Fonda's bestselling autobiography, My Life So Far (2005) comes this comprehensive biography by her longtime friend and well-known biographer. Fonda and Bosworth met when they were both students at the Actors Studio in the 1960s. Shifting from acting to journalism, Bosworth eventually wrote acclaimed biographies of Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando and Diane Arbus. Beginning with an article in McCall's, she has been writing about Fonda since 1970, and she spent 10 years on this book, a probe of Fonda's psychological depths as well as her multifaceted life as actress, model, author, daughter, wife, political activist, feminist, fitness expert, and philanthropist. Career triumphs are balanced with equal time for forgotten failures, such as The Fun Couple, which "mercifully closed" on Broadway in 1962 after only three performances. Illuminating the infamous "Hanoi Jane" episode, Bosworth also offers probing details of Fonda's marriages and affairs, her insecurities, her strained relationship with her father and her fierce ambition. The remarkable reconstruction of long ago events has a fly-on-the-wall viewpoint, written with such intimacy that it sometimes generates the strange sensation of being present with Fonda and her friends. With access to Fonda's FBI files and personal papers, plus extensive interviews with her family and colleagues, Bosworth has succeeded in capturing Fonda's step-by-step transformation from wide-eyed, apolitical ing nue to the poised personality of recent decades.
