Jane Fonda: The Private Life of a Public Woman

Patricia Bosworth

Aug 2011 · Sold by HMH

About this ebook

“The definitive portrait of a woman conflicted, torn between ferocious ambition, family, and feminist causes” (Gail Sheehy, author of Passages).
 
Jane Fonda emerged from a heartbreaking Hollywood family drama to become a ’60s onscreen ingénue and then an Oscar-winning actress. At the top of her game she risked it all, speaking out against the Vietnam War and shocking the world with a trip to Hanoi. One of Hollywood’s most committed feminists, she financed her husband Tom Hayden’s political career in the ’80s with a series of exercise videos that sparked a nationwide fitness craze. Even more surprising was Fonda’s next turn, as a Stepford Wife of the Gulfstream set, marrying Ted Turner and seemingly walking away from her ideals and her career.
 
Patricia Bosworth goes behind the image of an American superwoman, revealing the real Jane Fonda—more powerful and vulnerable than we ever expected—whose struggles for high achievement, love, and motherhood mirror the conflicts of an entire generation of women. In the hands of this seasoned, tenacious biographer, the evolution of one of the world’s most controversial and successful women becomes nothing less than a great, enthralling American life.
 
“A book that gets unusually close to its subject. It sees what Ms. Fonda cannot see about herself.” —The New York Times
 
“Bosworth’s thorough account of this wild, uniquely twentieth-century Hollywood life makes Jane Fonda the actress even more intriguing.” —San Francisco Chronicle

Ratings and reviews

I loved it!!!

About the author

Patricia Bosworth (1933–2020) was a bestselling journalist and biographer. She was a contributing editor for Vanity Fair and a contributor to the New York Times and the Nation. She was also a Broadway actor for nearly a decade, and went on to run the Playwrights/Directors Unit at the Actors Studio. Bosworth taught nonfiction writing at Columbia University as senior fellow at the National Arts Journalism Program, and lectured at Barnard, Yale University, and the New School. Her books include Montgomery Clift (1978), Diane Arbus (1984), Marlon Brando (2000), and Jane Fonda: The Private Life of a Public Woman (2011).