After receiving the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award, Jane Fonda sat down with Fran Drescher, then president of SAG-AFTRA, for the union’s Actor to Actor series. Two Oscars, decades of activism and a revelation about Grace and Frankie are all part of the conversation.
From “stupid” first film to her own productions
Fonda hated her first film, Tall Story, and almost quit. What kept her going was a real character in her second, Walk on the Wild Side. On They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? she stayed at the studio, after dancing non-stop for four days with Red Buttons to prepare: it was the first film she made that “truly reflected something about my society”. With her partner Bruce Gilbert, her company produced The China Syndrome and 9 to 5, which was her idea.
A secret about “Grace and Frankie”
Fonda shared something she had never said publicly: during the first season of Grace and Frankie, she had a breakdown and hated going to work. A few sessions with a psychiatrist showed her why: the series began with two women being told by their husbands that they were leaving, and that theme of abandonment had triggered her. Once she understood it, she “had a blast”. She credits creator Marta Kauffman with the show’s worldwide success with women of all ages.
She has never made a feature film with a woman director, she notes, but she remembers sets where the only other woman was the script supervisor. Today there are women grips, electricians and camera operators: “It’s made so much progress.”
Backlash as a sign of success
On attacks on women’s rights, Fonda’s view is clear: they are happening “because we’ve been so successful”. Women have gained ground in business, politics, the courts and culture, and that frightens some people. She quotes Gloria Steinem: women are not better than men, they just do not have their masculinity to prove. Until her activism in the 1970s, she says, she had no women friends.
Now a climate activist, she sees climate and democracy as two battles that will be won or lost together. Drescher, who founded a green council at the union, adds her own fight against single-use plastic bottles on film sets. The two women also praise unions, which Fonda says once educated workers politically and gave them a community.