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.