Jane Fonda

There, he intermarried; the resultant family began to use Dutch given names, with Jane's first Fonda ancestor reaching New York in 1650.

Fonda also has English, French, and Scottish ancestry.

She was named for the third wife of Henry VIII, Jane Seymour, to whom she is distantly related on her mother's side, and because of whom, until she was in fourth grade, Fonda said she was called "Lady" (as in Lady Jane).

Her brother, Peter Fonda, was also an actor, and her maternal half-sister is Frances de Villers Brokaw (also known as "Pan"), whose daughter is Pilar Corrias, the owner of the Pilar Corrias Gallery in London.

Jane Seymour Fonda (born December 21, 1937) is an American actress and activist.

Recognized as a film icon, Fonda's work spans several genres and over six decades of film and television.

She is the recipient of numerous accolades, including two Academy Awards, two British Academy Film Awards, seven Golden Globe Awards, a Primetime Emmy Award, the AFI Life Achievement Award, the Honorary Palme d'Or, and the Cecil B. DeMille Award.

Jane Seymour Fonda was born via caesarean section on December 21, 1937, at Doctors Hospital in New York City.

Her parents were Canadian-born socialite Frances Ford Seymour and American actor Henry Fonda.

According to her father, the surname Fonda came from an Italian ancestor who immigrated to the Netherlands in the 1500s.

In 1950, when Fonda was 12, her mother committed suicide while undergoing treatment at Craig House psychiatric hospital in Beacon, New York.

Later that year, Henry Fonda married socialite Susan Blanchard, 23 years his junior; this marriage ended in divorce.

Aged 15, Jane taught dance at Fire Island Pines, New York.

Fonda attended Greenwich Academy in Greenwich, Connecticut; the Emma Willard School in Troy, New York; and Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York.

Before her acting career, she was a model and appeared twice on the cover of Vogue.

Fonda's stage work in the late 1950s laid the foundation for her film career in the 1960s.

Fonda became interested in the arts in 1954, while appearing with her father in a charity performance of The Country Girl at the Omaha Community Playhouse.

After dropping out of Vassar, she went to Paris for six months to study art.

Upon returning to the US, in 1958, she met Lee Strasberg; the meeting changed the course of her life.

Fonda said, "I went to the Actors Studio and Lee Strasberg told me I had talent. Real talent. It was the first time that anyone, except my father – who had to say so – told me I was good. At anything. It was a turning point in my life. I went to bed thinking about acting. I woke up thinking about acting. It was like the roof had come off my life!"

Born to socialite Frances Ford Seymour and actor Henry Fonda, Fonda made her acting debut with the 1960 Broadway play There Was a Little Girl, for which she received a nomination for the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play, and made her screen debut later the same year with the romantic comedy Tall Story.

She rose to prominence during the 1960s with the comedies Period of Adjustment (1962), Sunday in New York (1963), Cat Ballou (1965), Barefoot in the Park (1967), and Barbarella (1968) before receiving her first Oscar nomination for They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969).

She averaged almost two movies a year throughout the decade, starting in 1960 with Tall Story, in which she recreated one of her Broadway roles as a college cheerleader pursuing a basketball star, played by Anthony Perkins.

Period of Adjustment and Walk on the Wild Side followed in 1962.

In Walk on the Wild Side, Fonda played a prostitute, and earned a Golden Globe for Most Promising Newcomer.

Fonda then established herself as one of the most acclaimed actresses of her generation, winning the Academy Award for Best Actress twice in the '70s, for Klute (1971) and Coming Home (1978).

She was photographed sitting on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun on a 1972 visit to Hanoi, during which she gained the nickname "Hanoi Jane".

During this time, she was effectively blacklisted in Hollywood.

She has also protested the Iraq War and violence against women and describes herself as a feminist and environmental activist.

Her other nominations are for Julia (1977), The China Syndrome (1979), On Golden Pond (1981), and The Morning After (1986).

Consecutive hits Fun with Dick and Jane (1977), California Suite (1978), The Electric Horseman (1979), and 9 to 5 (1980) sustained Fonda's box-office drawing power, and she won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Actress in a Limited Series or Movie for the television film The Dollmaker (1984).

In 1982, Fonda released her first exercise video, Jane Fonda's Workout, which became the highest-selling videotape of its time.

It was the first of 22 such videos over the next 13 years, which collectively sold over 17 million copies.

After starring in Stanley & Iris (1990), Fonda took a hiatus from acting and returned with the comedy Monster-in-Law (2005).

In 2005, along with Robin Morgan and Gloria Steinem, she cofounded the Women's Media Center, an organization that works to amplify the voices of women in the media through advocacy, media and leadership training, and the creation of original content.

Fonda serves on the board of the organization.

Based in Los Angeles, she has lived all over the world, including six years in France and 20 in Atlanta.

She also returned to Broadway in the play 33 Variations (2009), earning a Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play nomination.

She has since starred in the independent films Youth (2015) and Our Souls at Night (2017) and on Netflix's comedy series Grace and Frankie (2015–2022), for which she earned a nomination for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series.

Fonda was a political activist in the counterculture era during the Vietnam War.