'I'm really scared': Why Jane Fonda fears for our future

Of all the topics you can tackle with Jane Fonda, few make her smile like the subject of falling in love.

"I've always loved falling in love, I'm insane when I fall in love," Fonda says, smiling. "All my sense of judgment just goes out the window. I'm completely mad. It always happens way too fast."

Jane Fonda in her latest film, Book Club.Credit: MELINDA SUE GORDON

But the 80-year-old, thrice-married actress, author and activist doesn't see love in her future.

"I don't feel that that kind of love is in the cards for me," she says. "I'm not looking for it. I don't miss it. I've had it a lot in my life."

Fonda with her father Henry in On Golden Pond.

Fonda says she has found empowerment through solitude.

"The animal I most identify with is a bear; a bear hibernates for long periods of time but when the bear comes out of hibernation, it wants to play," she says. "I love partying and playing and being with my friends, but then I have to go into my lair and I have to hibernate." It's a trait she inherited from her father, actor Henry Fonda; the pair's prickly on-screen relationship in 1981's On Golden Pond was said to parallel reality.

"My father ... he could've been alone forever," Fonda says. "He didn't speak. He was a painter. He'd be up on the top in his studio. He wanted to know we were down there and that we were alive [but] he didn't care if he ever saw us. I can go there real easy, solitude comes easily to me."

Fonda, who returns to Australia next month for two "evenings with" in which she will discuss her life and career, has a new film, Book Club, opening locally on August 23. She plays hotel owner Vivian, who attends a monthly book club with three close friends – widowed Diane (Diane Keaton), federal judge Sharon (Candice Bergen) and recently retired Carol (Mary Steenburgen).

Fonda with Lily Tomlin in Grace and Frankie.

The club's usual intellectual discourse is interrupted when Vivian chooses Fifty Shades of Grey, forcing the slightly stitched-up friends to talk more openly about their emotions and, in some cases, chase life-changing new relationships.

"Women like being with other women, they like gathering in a group and having a topic from which many other topics will bloom," Fonda says. "It's like what consciousness-raising used to be in the '60s and '70s. It's very valuable and it's also kind of revolutionary.

Jane Fonda returns to Australia in August.

"One of the things that I love the most about Book Club is the vision it has of women's friendships. So often in the mass media, we're viewed as competitive and so forth, and just seeing the friendship and how we have each other's backs is very important."

The notion that women must compete is a product of a patriarchal culture, Fonda says.

Jane Fonda in a scene from Klute.

I love partying and playing and being with my friends, but then I have to go into my lair and I have to hibernate.

Jane Fonda

"Since men have controlled so much of the narrative, it's the narrative about women that they tend to be drawn to and so it's what ends up on our screens and in books and magazines. I think the women's movement and what's happening now in particular is changing that, you know?"

Might we be on the brink of history's second act, one written by women? Fonda is intrigued by the idea. So what might it look like?

Fonda in 1968's Barbarella.

"Paradise, for men and women," she says. "It would be what God intended, what Buddha and Jesus and Allah, what they all intended. They were all on the spectrum of gender. The most unhealthy, dangerous, is the extreme of masculinity and the extreme of femininity.

"The healthiest is when they begin to approach each other. Women are strong. Men are not afraid to be vulnerable. That's the perfect."

The cast of 9 to 5, from left, Dolly Parton, Lily Tomlin and Fonda.

The bad news, she believes, is such a utopia is unlikely to happen.

"I think climate's going to overtake us before women are ever given a chance to write the second act. This is why I was so devastated when Trump was elected, because I thought if we really do what we know we have to do we can stave off the worst of it.

Robert Redford and Fonda in Barefoot in the Park (1967).

"Now it's too late," she says. "We can't. We've lost it. We didn't have any time to lose, so I'm really scared because [issues such as] immigration, refugees, are going to get five times worse. Natural disasters, pandemics ... this is all going to get worse. Economies are going to collapse.

"All of these things are total chaos, and what happens in chaos? Tyrants rise. People are getting much more tolerant of tyrants. We're a wounded beast [and] wounded beasts are very dangerous. Women are getting stronger, men are feeling endangered, and the climate is making all our problems much worse."

Book Club stars, from left, Diane Keaton, Candice Bergen, Jane Fonda and Mary Steenburgen.Credit: MELINDA SUE GORDON

In Book Club, Fonda's character is wrestling with her fear of loving and being loved, something she says she understands acutely.

"I think it's the disconnect that can damage somebody, make it challenging, relationships between men and women, although my gay and lesbian friends also have a lot of problems.

Fonda with her Best Actress Academy Award for Klute.Credit: Everett Collection Inc / Alamy Stock Photo

"It's very hard to overcome because a fear of intimacy starts when you're very little, and it's just hard to heal from that. One out of four women have been sexually abused as children... when that happens to you, you can heal and become a functioning person, but it's really, really, really hard to be able to tolerate intimacy."

There is perhaps a sentimental connection between Book Club and another Fonda film, the 1980 comedy 9 to 5. Fonda played a divorcee who returns to the workplace and, with colleagues played by Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton, effects a revolution in their male-dominated office.

"One of my best friends was a union organiser of office workers and every time I saw her, she would tell me stories about what secretaries were putting up with," Fonda recalls. "Eventually I said, 'I have got to make a movie about this'.

"I know... the effect that it had on women, especially working women. It doesn't surprise me that the film is still there [in cultural terms] because the problems are still there. It was very gratifying that it was successful. I'm glad it was a comedy. It could've been a tragedy."

Fonda's career began on Broadway in the 1960s, with a Tony-nominated performance in There Was a Little Girl. In the '60s and '70s she starred in films such as Barefoot in the Park, Barbarella and The China Syndrome. She won Academy Awards for her performances in Klute (1971) and Coming Home (1978).

A prominent activist during the Vietnam War, she was reborn as a fitness guru in the 1980s and later retired to her third marriage, to media mogul Ted Turner (they divorced in 2001).

In the past decade her career has enjoyed what she has described as its "third act"; she returned to Broadway with a Tony-nominated performance in 33 Variations and starred in the HBO series The Newsroom, Netflix's Grace and Frankie and last year's Our Souls at Night, with Robert Redford.

"You've seen... plays where the first act you're thinking, 'What is this author getting at? What is this supposed to be about?' Then the third act comes along and pulls it all together and you think, 'OK, that's what it was about'," Fonda says.

"Whatever went on in the first two acts, if you can understand what went on and what the themes are, you can be more deliberate in making that all come together in a way that makes sense of who you are in your third act. So it's very good, in that last act, to be intentional, to really try to learn about yourself and to understand yourself like it's a project."

In writing her 2005 memoir, My Life So Far, Fonda says she felt more like an archeologist than an author. "It was not me," she says. "There's this person here, and I'm going to excavate this person and her parents and her grandparents.

"Whatever you come to be before you die is really important because you don't want to be on your deathbed with a lot of regrets and without any love around you. In order for that to be the case, you have to kind of earn that during your life."

Fonda's biggest regret, she says, is that she was not a better parent. She has three children: Vanessa Vadim, from her first marriage to director Roger Vadim; Troy Garity, from her second marriage to activist Tom Hayden; and Lulu Williams, whom Fonda and Hayden adopted in 1982.

"I think about it every day, and I'm very, very sad about it," she says. "I didn't know how to be a good parent. My mother killed herself when I was 12. My father was a bit of a narcissist and he was away a lot. I didn't really know how to do it, plus I was very driven.

"My daughter was born just as I became an activist, and it was a very fraught time. There was violence. There were arrests. So I just wasn't there enough ... I'm doing my best to try to make up for it now. You can. It's never too late. You can."

The subject is clearly an emotional one. Fonda pauses, and looks away, and takes a moment to collect her thoughts.

One of the reasons she decided to write a memoir was "because I wanted [Vanessa] to understand it wasn't her fault. This is why I'm a damaged person and a handicapped person. It wasn't because she isn't a wonderful, lovable person."

Remarkably fit at 80, Fonda is plainly living the very best – and most resilient – version of herself so far.

"I would not want to go back," she declares with some assurance. "There's not one decade I would want to go back to. It was not the 'good old days'. I mean, I had fun and certainly it was a fascinating life, but I have worked very, very hard to try to figure out who I am.

"The French have a saying, bien dans sa peau, which means to be good in my skin," she says. "It's been very, very hard, and it's been very intentional.

"I did a show where they asked me to write a letter to myself, and I said, 'terrible things are going to happen to you. Don't lose sight of the fact that it can get better, that this will not destroy you, that it will make you stronger, and that you will keep going and keep growing. Don't give up'."

That resilience – in herself and others – fascinates her.

"Most of my women friends have had traumatic things happen to them," she says. "All of them have been sexually abused ... which makes me know that it's an epidemic. They all are resilient. It has not destroyed them. It has made them stronger."

In her own childhood, she says, "I had nobody really looking after me, but it was like a laser light constantly scanning the horizon for any warm body that could possibly love me or teach me something. Often it was the mothers of my girlfriends, who would sit me on their lap and teach me things.

"And there are all those girls who ... aren't resilient and who will be destroyed by the things that happen to young people when we're so vulnerable ... [but] I always have that other," she says. "And I'm glad I do because it allows me to remain empathetic to people who aren't like me.

"I've been very lucky. It's not something you deserve or earn or do. It's just you have it or you don't."

Book Club opens on August 23. An Evening with Jane Fonda is at Sydney Opera House on August 27 and Melbourne's Hamer Hall on August 28.