Monday Minute
No. 12 | January 18, 2010

It Runs in the Family

Bogart’s father was a surgeon, Olivier’s an Anglican priest, Cagney’s a bartender and boxer.  Actors come from every walk of life.  But for many actors, the family business is acting.  They grow up in show biz, the sons and daughters of actors and actresses.  We see that happen quite a bit.  What’s not so common, though, is the family of actors that passes the trade from the second generation to the third.

Our theme this week
Families with three (or more) generations of film actors

The Fondas

The essentials
First Generation:  Henry
Second Generation:  Jane, Peter
Third Generation:  Bridget (Peter)

Henry Fonda grew up in Nebraska.  He didn’t have a famous name, but his mother knew Dodie Brando (mother of Marlon), who helped him get his start at the community theater in Omaha.  He went on to do summer stock in Cape Cod, then Broadway, where he played the lead in the 1934 production of The Farmer Takes a Wife.  When the comedy was filmed the next year, Fonda reprised his role, and the struggling stage actor was suddenly a movie star making $3,000 a week.   Fonda went on to become one of Hollywood’s biggest names.  He often played the idealist, the soft-spoken, honest type who would stand up for a cause, or for himself, when needed.  He appeared in many westerns and war movies, and over the years starred in an impressive number of top films:  The Grapes of Wrath (1940), The Lady Eve (1941), My Darling Clementine (1946), Mister Roberts (1955), 12 Angry Men (1957), Fail-Safe (1964), and How the West Was Won (1968).  A year after he received an Honorary Oscar, he won his first Academy Award for acting, for On Golden Pond (1981).  The film featured Henry and Jane Fonda as father and daughter, their only performance together, with a strained relationship onscreen that paralleled difficulties between the two actors in real life.

Jane Fonda was the daughter of Henry and Frances Ford Seymour, the second of Henry’s five wives, who suffered from mental illness and killed herself when Jane was 12.  Jane modeled and acted on stage before making films.  Her first big success was the comedy western Cat Ballou (1965), which led to the film adaptation of Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park (1967), opposite Robert Redford, and the sci-fi spoof Barbarella (1968).  Her career soared over the next decade, with mostly dramatic roles in films such as They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969), Klute (1971), Julia (1977), Coming Home (1978), and The China Syndrome (1979).  Meanwhile, she become well-known for her political activism in support of civil rights, American Indians, and feminism, and for her opposition to the war in Vietnam (her 1972 trip to Hanoi was especially controversial).  In the ’80s, she turned to comedy with Nine to Five, then On Golden Pond, with her father, and as a psychiatrist in Agnes of God (1985)—though her best-known role may have been the aerobics guru she played in a very popular series of videotapes.  She retired from movies, then returned in 2005 to star in the hit comedy Monster-in-Law.

Peter Fonda is two years younger than his sister Jane.  He had his first big success as the Harley-riding “Captain America” of Easy Rider (1969), a countercultural landmark and a movie that changed Hollywood.  He had a hit with the car chase film Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry (1974), teamed with Warren Oates for Race with the Devil (1975), and made other films playing the role of the rebel, a contrast to the more upright image portrayed by his father.  He won critical acclaim and an Oscar as the beekeeper in Ulee’s Gold (1997).  In supporting roles, he appeared in Steven Soderbergh’s The Limey (1999) and the western remake 3:10 to Yuma (2007).

As a five-year-old, Bridget Fonda made her first screen appearance in her father’s hit Easy Rider.  She was in a string of notable films of the ’90s, appearing in The Godfather: Part III (1991), Single White Female (1992), the English-language remake of La Femme Nikita, Point of No Return (1993), Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown (1997), and A Simple Plan (1998).  She turned to TV in the new decade, then married (composer Danny Elfman) and had a child.  She hasn’t been in a movie since 2002.

Beyond the final credits
Though Henry was never known to be as politically outspoken as his daughter, he did take a controversial stand in 1947, joining Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, and John Huston in an open letter to the House Committee on Un-American Activities.  They sought an end to Congress’s investigations of Communist activity in Hollywood.  The investigations continued, however, and the political climate in Southern California during the blacklist era would be in part responsble for Fonda’s move to New York.  He returned to Hollywood in 1955 to play the title character in Mister Roberts, a role he had performed on Broadway.

---

Barefoot in the Park (1967)
Jane Fonda, Robert Redford

---

Quote of Note
“Then it don’t matter. I’ll be all around in the dark.  I’ll be everywhere. Wherever you can look—wherever there’s a fight, so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad. I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry and they know supper’s ready, and when the people are eatin’ the stuff they raise and livin’ in the houses they build—I’ll be there, too.”
— Tom Joad (Henry Fonda), The Grapes of Wrath (1940)

…58…59…60.