Academy Award-Winning Actress Jane Fonda Achieved Apotheosis as Hollywood's Premier Sex Pot

Fonda's Best Actress Wins in "Klute" and "Coming Home" Reveal Her as a Prisoner of Her Sexual Persona

Potty-mouthed Seventies superstar Jane Fonda had long been a world-class iconoclast and taboo-buster before dropping the C-Bomb during an appearance on The Today Show. Decades before using the c-word as casually as if she were mentioning new toiletries at a suburban koffeeklatsch, Lady Jane frolicked bare-bottomed on the Silver Screen, ostensibly as an "Up yours!" gesture to her straight-laced father, screen icon Henry Fonda, whom she blamed for the suicide of her mother, the manikin Frances Seymour Brokaw. For La Fonda, being a cinema slut was not only a rite of passage, but a causus beli, to boot. Before she donned a North Vietnamese helmet and posed provocatively on an ack-ack gun in Hanoi, Jane was a warrior in the trenches of the sexual revolution. Jane Fonda was a rebel with a cause, and she managed to take on Hollywood in its entirety and told it to kiss her foot, if not other nether regions.

Unfortunately for her and her legions of fans, her development as an actress was stymied by her dedication to the sexual persona that she embraced from the very beginning of her career. In her 2005 autobiography My Life So Far, Jane Fonda says that she has been defined by the men in her life, and as her sexual persona was the response to that molding of men, she was never able to free herself from them -- or it -- and develop a career as a mature actress, a time of life when a woman of her generation would be expected to achieve independent, self-definition. Jane Fonda essentially quit acting while still possessing her sex pot persona. unable to navigate away from the posession of her identity by men.