Wednesday, August 17, 2011

JANE FONDA

I don't know about you, but I've been falling in and out of love with her since the first time I saw her in TALL STORY, including the several times I got to meet and talk with her during my years in "Hollywood."

I caught her tonight being interviewed for her latest book by Charlie Rose (a guy I don't watch so much anymore because I find him a pretty weak interviewer actually, and a pretty full-of-himself one too). And I have to admit, fell in love with her all over again.

This time it was her honesty that did it. And there's no question that for a I think they said seventy-three-year-old woman, even one who has had plastic surgery, she's still a knockout.

There also seemed to be less of the brittleness of old, or the guardedness. The few times I had a chance to talk with her I found her one of the handful of really big stars I met over the years who could fully focus on someone not a player in that world and engage in a conversation without making it about her or looking over your shoulder to see who might be more important than you in the room etc.

In fact, I found her bright and curious and as intense and in the moment in her attention to our conversation as anyone I've ever talked to. I liked her, as well as continued to go in and out of having a crush on her.

I also identify with all the changes she's willing to take a chance on, and the ways in which she always seems to find something useful to make out of her experiences, turning them into life lessons or at least life suggestions. I admire her, actually, more than ever, despite the choices she's made and the things she's said that I not only don't agree with sometimes, but strongly object to.

I hope she keeps going, and lives to be an example of how to be in your nineties and still find new ways to meet whatever challenges that time of life throws at her. She talked about Ketherine Hepburn a lot in this interview and I thought in a way she's become our new Katherine Hepburn, the older one who was eccentric and wise and self-assured and always a star.

9 comments:

Robert G. Zuckerman said...

Michael, You've probably seen this but if not, prepare to howl:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFE2CCfAP1o

JIm said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Lally said...

Hysterical Robert. I hadn't seen that, so thanks.

Anonymous said...

she is an actress!

a young actress when she went to North Viet Nam

an older actress when she did this interview...

between then and now she's had MANY YEARS to reherse this reply.
I wonder when the movie will come out and give us

.... the Truth? and, who will play "Jane Fonda"?

p.s. I protested the VN War which the Vietnamese call The American War

JIm said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Lally said...

As always, in her interview, she admitted that her greatest regret was allowing herself to be seated on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun. The photo of her, of course, has been used ever since by the right. Though many have accepted her apology and regrets, including former prisoners of war the right cannot. She has an entire blog dedicated just to that issue and her apology and regrets, and was working with U.S troops when the photo was taken, trying to get them out of a pointless war that destroyed much of a country and its people, as well as divided our own and led to, if I remember correctly, over fifty thousand deaths of our troops, including men I knew. It was a mistake, which she acknowledges. I have yet to hear Bush/Cheney and all their rightwing followers (many of whom have now turned on Junior at least) apologize for anything, including allowing 9/11 to happen and starting an endless war with a country that had nothing to do with it.

Anonymous said...

GEE

50,000 American troops died..
250,000 Vietnamese ALSO died

both North VN and S VN

boy, we did a terrific job there ! all those people dead and we just left them with Agent Orange and Napalm
to inhale...we did good as, more of them rat bas...ds died then us

JIm said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Anonymous said...

actually about 1 MILLION North Vietnamese were killed

and about the same number of South Vietnamese

just one small step for mankind to reduce world over-population via war..

now

starvation via draught and politics is another way like now in Somalia