Jane Fonda

Jane Fonda never imagined acting at 80, said Sophie Heawood in TheGuardian.com. She has a role in the ongoing Netflix series Grace and Frankie and continues to star in films after six decades in Hollywood. “I feel damn lucky,” Fonda says. “At 65, I never thought I’d have a career. I keep pinching myself.” She admits that face-lifts “bought me an extra 10 years” in acting, though she’s not proud of it. In fact, she suspects women who overdo plastic surgery have a self-loathing that originates in sexual abuse. When she sees the face “of a woman who has made herself into a mask, I always think to myself…I wonder, I wonder.” Fonda herself was sexually abused during a tumultuous childhood; her father, actor Henry Fonda, was largely absent, and her mother committed suicide in a psychiatric hospital. For much of her life, Fonda says, she lived to please men, and only at 62, after her divorce from Ted Turner, did she feel that “I could live inside my own skin.” It was a major awakening. “I feel very sad that so many girls are abused all over the world and that men don’t understand what it does to them,” she says. “It can alter a person.” Fonda is grateful, above all, to witness the justice of #MeToo. “I did not think I would live to see it.” ■