|
The following biography
is from
Wikipedia.org
“The
Free Encyclopedia.”
Henry Jaynes Fonda (May 16, 1905 – August
12, 1982) was a highly acclaimed Academy Award-winning American film
actor, best known for his roles as plain-speaking idealists. Fonda's
subtle, naturalistic acting style preceded by many years the
popularization of method acting.
Fonda made his mark early as a Broadway
actor, and made his Hollywood debut in 1935. Fonda's career gained
momentum after his Academy Award-nominated performance in 1940's The
Grapes of Wrath, an adaptation of John Steinbeck's novel about an
Oklahoma family who moved west during the Dust Bowl. Throughout six
decades in Hollywood, Fonda cultivated a strong, appealing screen image
in such classics as The Ox-Bow Incident, Mister Roberts, and 12 Angry
Men. Later, Fonda moved toward both more challenging and lighter roles
in such epics as Once Upon a Time in the West and family comedies like
Yours, Mine and Ours (with Lucille Ball).
He was the patriarch of a family of famous
actors, including daughter Jane Fonda, son Peter Fonda, granddaughter
Bridget Fonda, and grandson Troy Garity.
In 1999, he was named the sixth Greatest
Male Star of All Time by the American Film Institute.
****
Birth name Henry Jaynes Fonda
Born May 16, 1905
Grand Island, Nebraska, US
Died August 12, 1982, aged 77
Los Angeles, California, US
Height 6 ft 1½ in (1.87 m)
Spouse(s) Margaret Sullavan (1931-1932)
Frances Seymour Brokaw (1936-1950)
Susan Blanchard (1950-1956)
Afdera Franchetti (1957-1961)
Shirley Fonda (1965-1982)
Notable roles Abraham Lincoln in Young Mr.
Lincoln (1939)
Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath (1940)
Wyatt Earp in My Darling Clementine (1946)
Lt. Col. Owen Thursday in Fort Apache
(1948)
Emmanuel Balestrero in The Wrong Man (1956)
Juror #8 in 12 Angry Men (1957)
Frank in Once Upon a Time in the West
(1968)
Norman in On Golden Pond (1981)
Academy Awards
Best Actor
1981 On Golden Pond
Tony Awards
Best Actor
1948 Mister Roberts
****
Life and career
Family history and early life
He was born in Grand Island, Nebraska to
William Brace Fonda and Herberta Krueger Jaynes, observant Christian
Scientists. The Fonda family had emigrated westward from New York in the
1800s, and can trace its ancestry from Genoa, Italy to The Netherlands
in the 1500s, and then to the United States of America in the 1600s
(see[1]). In Henry Fonda's autobiography, he wrote:
"Early records show the family ensconced in
northern Italy in the sixteenth century where they fought on the side of
the Reformation, fled to Holland, intermarried with Dutch burghers'
daughters, picked up the first names of the Low Countries, but retained
the Italianate "Fonda". Before Pieter Stuyvesant surrendered Nieuw
Amsterdam to the English the Fondas, instead of settling in Manhattan,
canoed up the Hudson River to the Indian village of Caughawaga. Within a
few generations, the Mohawks and the Iroquois were butchered or fled and
the town became known to mapmakers as Fonda, New York" (see [2]).
As a youth in Nebraska, Fonda was active in
the Boy Scouts of America and was a Scoutmaster, but was not an Eagle
Scout as some report[1].Fonda relayed the story in the Parkinson show
(UK) in the mid 1970s that his father had taken him to see the aftermath
of a lynching. This so enraged the young Fonda that a keen social
awareness of prejudice was present within him for his entire adult
life.He then attended the University of Minnesota, majoring in
journalism (see[3]), although he did not graduate.
At age twenty, he started his acting career
at the Omaha Community Playhouse when his mother's friend Dodie Brando
(mother of Marlon Brando) needed a young man to play the lead in You and
I. He went east to perform with the Provincetown Players and Joshua
Logan's University Players, an intercollegiate summer stock company,
where he worked with Margaret Sullavan, his future wife, and began a
lifelong friendship with Jimmy Stewart.
Early career
Fonda and Stewart headed for New York City,
where the two were roommates and honed their skills on Broadway. Fonda
appeared in theatrical productions from 1926 to 1934, and made his first
film appearance (1935) as the leading man in 20th Century Fox's screen
adaptation of The Farmer Takes a Wife, reprising his role from the
Broadway production of the same name. In 1935 Fonda starred in the RKO
film "I Dream Too Much" with the famous opera star Lily Pons.
Fonda's film career blossomed as he
costarred with Sylvia Sidney and Fred MacMurray in The Trail of the
Lonesome Pine (1936), the first Technicolor movie filmed outdoors. Fonda
also got the nod for the lead role in You Only Live Once (1937), also
costarring Sidney, and directed by Fritz Lang. A critical success
opposite Bette Davis in the film Jezebel (1938) was followed by the
title role in Young Mr. Lincoln and his first collaboration with
director John Ford.
Fonda's successes led Ford to recruit him
to play "Tom Joad" in the film version of John Steinbeck's novel The
Grapes of Wrath (1940), but a reluctant Darryl Zanuck, who preferred
Tyrone Power, insisted on Fonda's signing a seven-year contract with the
studio, Twentieth Century-Fox ([4]). Fonda agreed, and was ultimately
nominated for an Academy Award for his work in the 1940 film, which many
consider to be his finest role, but he was "pipped at the post" (edged
out) by Stewart, who won the award for his role in The Philadelphia
Story.
World War II service
Fonda played opposite Barbara Stanwyck in
The Lady Eve (1941), and was acclaimed for his role in The Ox-Bow
Incident, but he then enlisted in the Navy to fight in World War II,
saying, "I don't want to be in a fake war in a studio" ([5]).
Previously, he and Stewart had helped raise
funds for the defense of Britain from the Nazis ([6]). Fonda served for
three years, initially as a Quartermaster 3rd Class on the destroyer USS
Satterlee; he was later commissioned as a Lieutenant Junior Grade in Air
Combat Intelligence in the Central Pacific and won a Presidential
Citation and the Bronze Star ([7], [8]).
Post-war career
After the war, Fonda appeared in the film
Fort Apache (1948), and his contract with Fox expired. Refusing another
long-term studio contract, Fonda returned to Broadway, wearing his own
officer's cap to originate the title role in Mister Roberts, a comedy
about the Navy. He won a 1948 Tony Award for the part, and later
reprised his performance in the national tour and the 1955 film version
opposite James Cagney, continuing a pattern of bringing his acclaimed
stage roles to life on the big screen.
On the set of Mister Roberts, Fonda came to
blows with John Ford and vowed never to work for him again. He never
did. This eventual parting of ways with Ford is one of cinema's great
turning points. Fonda is regarded as the period's greatest actor, and
Ford the greatest director; up to that point, both John Wayne and Fonda
had both appeared prominently in the leads of Ford's films and been
Ford's good friends. After Mister Roberts, Wayne became Ford's only
leading man, to the point where audiences have come to identify any film
with Ford as the director as having Wayne as the star. Had Fonda allied
with Ford, it is doubtful Wayne could have monopolized Ford's time, and
perhaps Wayne's legend would have faded instead of his being known as
the greatest director's only leading man.
Career in the 1950s and 1960s
After a six-year break from Hollywood,
Fonda returned in the critically acclaimed Mister Roberts, as Lt.
Douglas Roberts, a role he had originated in the play. He followed this
with Paramount Pictures's production of the Leo Tolstoy epic War and
Peace, in which Fonda played Pierre Bezukhov opposite Audrey Hepburn.
Fonda worked with Alfred Hitchcock in 1956, playing a man falsely
accused of murder in The Wrong Man.
In 1957, Fonda made his first foray into
production with 12 Angry Men, based on a script by Reginald Rose and
directed by Sidney Lumet. The intense film about twelve jurors deciding
the fate of a young man accused of murder was well-received by critics
worldwide. Fonda shared the Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations
with co-producer Reginald Rose and won the 1958 BAFTA Award for Best
Actor for his performance as the logical "Juror #8". Fonda vowed that he
would never ever produce a movie again. After a series of ordinary
western movies, Fonda returned to the production seat for the NBC
western television series The Deputy (1959-1961), in which he also
starred.
The 1960s saw Fonda perform in a number of
war and western epics, including 1962's The Longest Day and How the West
Was Won, 1965's In Harm's Way and Battle of the Bulge, and the suspense
film Fail-Safe (1964), about possible nuclear holocaust. He also
returned to more light-hearted cinema in Spencer's Mountain (1963) with
actors Kym Karath and Veronica Cartwright, which was the inspiration for
the TV series, The Waltons.
He appeared against type as the villain
"Frank" in 1968's Once Upon a Time in the West. After initially turning
down the role, he was convinced to accept it by the actor Eli Wallach
and director Sergio Leone, who flew from Italy to the United States to
persuade him to play the part. Fonda had planned on wearing a pair of
brown-colored contact lenses, but Leone had worked important close-up
shots of Fonda's blue eyes into the film.
Fonda's relationship with Jimmy Stewart
survived their disagreements over politics — Fonda was a liberal
Democrat, and Stewart a conservative Republican. After a heated
argument, they avoided talking politics with each other. In 1970, Fonda
and Stewart costarred in the western The Cheyenne Social Club, a minor
film in which the two humorously argued politics. They had first
appeared together on film in On Our Merry Way (1948), a comedy which
also starred William Demarest and Fred MacMurray and featured a grown-up
Carl "Alfalfa" Switzer (see[9]).
Marriages and children
Henry Fonda was married five times. His
marriage to Margaret Brooke Sullavan in 1931 soon ended in separation,
which was finalized in a 1933 divorce. In 1936, he married Frances Ford
Seymour. They had two children, Peter and Jane. In 1950, Seymour
committed suicide. Fonda married Susan Blanchard, the stepdaughter of
Oscar Hammerstein II, in 1950. Together, they adopted a daughter, Amy
(born 1953) ([10]), but divorced three years later. In 1957 Fonda
married Italian Countess Afdera Franchetti ([11]). They remained married
until 1961. Soon after Fonda married Shirlee Mae Adams, and remained
with her until his death in 1982.
His relationship with his children has been
described as "emotionally distant". In Peter Fonda's 1998 autobiography
Don't Tell Dad, he described how he was never sure how his father felt
about him, and that he did not tell his father he loved him until his
father was elderly and he finally heard the words, "I love you, son"
([12]). His daughter Jane rejected her father's friendships with
Republican actors such as John Wayne, and as a result, their
relationship was extremely strained.
Jane Fonda also reported feeling detached
from her father, especially during her early acting career. Henry Fonda
introduced her to Lee Strasberg, who became her acting teacher, and as
she developed as an actress using the techniques of "The Method," she
found herself frustrated and unable to understand her father's
effortless acting style. In the late 1950s, when she asked him how he
prepared before going on stage, he baffled her by answering, "I don’t
know, I stand there, I think about my wife, Afdera, I don't know."
Writer Al Aronowitz, while working on a
profile of Jane Fonda for The Saturday Evening Post in the 1960s, asked
Henry Fonda about Method acting: "I can't articulate about the Method,"
he told me, "because I never studied it. I don't mean to suggest that I
have any feelings one way or the other about it...I don't know what the
Method is and I don’t care what the Method is. Everybody's got a method.
Everybody can’t articulate about their method, and I can't, if I have a
method—and Jane sometimes says that I use the Method, that is, the
capital letter Method, without being aware of it. Maybe I do; it doesn’t
matter."
Fonda's daughter shared this view: "My
father can't articulate the way he works." Jane said. "He just can't do
it. He's not even conscious of what he does, and it made him nervous for
me to try to articulate what I was trying to do. And I sensed that
immediately, so we did very little talking about it...he said, 'Shut up,
I don't want to hear about it.’ He didn’t want me to tell him about it,
you know. He wanted to make fun of it."
Fonda himself once admitted in an interview
that he felt he wasn't a good father to his children. In the same
interview, he explained that he did his best to stay out of the way of
Jane and Peter's careers, citing that he felt it was important to them
to know that they succeeded because they worked hard and not because
they used his fame to achieve their goals.
Late career
Despite approaching his seventies, Henry
Fonda continued to work in both television and film through the 1970s.
In 1970 Fonda appeared in three films, the most successful of these
ventures being The Cheyenne Social Club. The other two films were Too
Late the Hero, in which Fonda played a secondary role, and There Was a
Crooked Man, about Paris Pitman Jr. (played by Kirk Douglas) trying to
escape from an Arizona prison.
Fonda made a return to both foreign and
television productions, which provided career sustenance through a
decade in which many aging screen actors suffered waning careers. He
starred in the ABC television series The Smith Family between 1971 and
1972. 1973's TV-movie The Red Pony, an adaptation of John Steinbeck's
novel, earned Fonda an Emmy nomination. After the unsuccessful Hollywood
melodrama, Ash Wednesday, he filmed three Italian productions released
in 1973 and 1974. The most successful of these, Il Mio nome è Nessuno
(My Name Is Nobody), presented Fonda in a rare comedic performance as an
old gunslinger whose plans to retire are dampened by a "fan" of sorts.
Henry Fonda continued stage acting
throughout his last years, including several demanding roles in Broadway
plays. He returned to Broadway in 1974 for the biographical drama,
Clarence Darrow, for which he was nominated for a Tony Award. Fonda's
health had been deteriorating for years, but his first outward symptoms
occurred after a performance of the play in April 1974, when he
collapsed from exhaustion. After the appearance of a heart arrhythmia, a
pacemaker was installed and Fonda returned to the play in 1975. After
the run of a 1978 play, First Monday of October, he took the advice of
his doctors and quit plays, though he continued to star in films and
television.
In 1976, Fonda appeared in several notable
television productions, the first being Collision Course, the story of
the volatile relationship between President Harry Truman (E.G. Marshall)
and General MacArthur (Fonda), produced by ABC. After an appearance in
the acclaimed Showtime broadcast of Almos' a Man, based on a story by
Richard Wright, he starred in the epic NBC miniseries Captains and
Kings, based on Taylor Caldwell's novel. Three years later, he appeared
in ABC's Roots: The Next Generations, but the miniseries was
overshadowed by its predecessor, Roots. Also in 1976, Fonda starred in
the World War II blockbuster Midway.
Fonda finished the 1970s in a number of
disaster films. The first of these was the 1977 Italian killer octopus
thriller Tentacoli (Tentacles) and the mediocre Rollercoaster, in which
Fonda appeared with Richard Widmark and a young Helen Hunt. He performed
once again with Widmark, Olivia de Havilland, Fred MacMurray, and José
Ferrer in the killer bee action film The Swarm. He also acted in the
global disaster film Meteor, with Natalie Wood and Martin Landau, and
then the Canadian production City on Fire, which also featured Shelley
Winters and Ava Gardner.
As Fonda's health continued to suffer and
he took longer breaks between filming, critics began to take notice of
his extensive body of work. In 1979, the Tony Awards committee gave
Fonda a special award for his achievements on Broadway. Lifetime
Achievement awards from the Golden Globes and Academy Awards followed in
1980 and 1981, respectively.
Fonda continued to act into the early
1980s, though all but one of the productions he was featured in before
his death were for television. These television works included the
critically acclaimed live performance of Preston Jones' The Oldest
Living Graduate, the Emmy nominated Gideon's Trumpet (co-starring Fay
Wray in her last performance), and 1981's Summer Solstice, which teamed
Fonda with the legendary Myrna Loy for the first time. This is the last
film on which Henry Fonda worked, and work began on it following the
release of On Golden Pond, an adaptation of Ernest Thompson's On Golden
Pond.
The film, directed by Mark Rydell, provided
unprecedented collaborations between Fonda, Katharine Hepburn, and
Fonda's daughter, Jane. When premiered in December 1981, the film was
well received by critics, and after a limited release on December 4 On
Golden Pond developed enough of an audience to be widely released on
January 22. With eleven Academy Award nominations, the film earned
nearly $120 million at the box office, becoming an unexpected
blockbuster. In addition to wins for Hepburn (Best Actress), and
Thompson (Screenplay), On Golden Pond brought Fonda his only Oscar for
Best Actor (it also earned him a Golden Globe Best Actor award). After
Fonda's death, some film critics called this performance "his last and
greatest role".
Death and legacy
Fonda died at his Los Angeles home on
August 12, 1982, at the age of 77 from heart disease. Fonda's wife
Shirlee and daughter Jane were at his side when he died. He also
suffered from prostate cancer, but this did not directly cause his death
and was only mentioned as a concurrent ailment on his death certificate.
In the years since his death, his career
has been held in even higher regard than during his life. He is widely
recognized as one of the Hollywood greats of the classic era. On the
centenary of his birth, May 16, 2005, Turner Classic Movies honored him
with a marathon of his films. Also in May 2005, the United States Post
Office released a thirty-seven-cent postage stamp with an artist's
drawing of Fonda as part of their "Hollywood legends" series (see [13]).
Filmography
Main article: Henry Fonda filmography
From the beginning of Henry Fonda's career
in 1935 through his last projects in 1981, Fonda appeared in 106 films,
television programs, and shorts. Through the course of his career he
appeared in many critically acclaimed films, including such classics as
12 Angry Men and The Ox-Bow Incident. His roles in 1940's The Grapes of
Wrath and 1981's On Golden Pond earned him Academy Award nominations (he
won for the latter). Fonda made his mark in westerns and war films, and
made frequent appearances in both television and foreign productions
late in his career.
Broadway stage performances
The Game of Love and Death (Nov. 1929–Jan.
1930)
I Loved You, Wednesday (Oct.–Dec. 1932)
New Faces of 1934 (Revue; Mar.–Jul. 1934)
The Farmer Takes a Wife (Oct. 1934–Jan.
1935)
Blow Ye Winds (Sep.–Oct. 1937)
Mister Roberts (Feb. 1948–Jan. 1951)
Point of No Return (Dec. 1951–Nov. 1952)
The Caine Mutiny (Jan. 1954–Jan. 1955)
Two for the Seesaw (Jan. 1958–Oct. 1959)
Silent Night, Lonely Night (Dec. 1959–Mar.
1960)
Critic's Choice (Dec. 1960–May 1961)
A Gift of Time (Feb.–May 1962)
Generation (Oct. 1965–Jun. 1966)
Our Town (Nov.–Dec. 1969)
Clarence Darrow (Mar.–Apr. 1974; Mar. 1975)
First Monday in October (Oct.–Dec. 1978)
They Call Me Nobody W/Terence Hill (1973)
Awards
Year Award Work
Academy Awards
Won:
1982 Best Actor On Golden Pond
1981 Honorary Award Lifetime Achievement
Nominated:
1958 Best Picture 12 Angry Men
1941 Best Actor The Grapes of Wrath
BAFTA Awards
Won:
1958 Best Actor 12 Angry Men
Nominated:
1982 Best Actor On Golden Pond
Emmy Awards
Nominated:
1980 Outstanding Lead Actor in a Miniseries
or Movie Gideon's Trumpet
1973 Outstanding Lead Actor in a Miniseries
or Movie The Red Pony
Golden Globes
Won:
1982 Best Motion Picture Actor - Drama On
Golden Pond
1980 Cecil B. DeMille Award Lifetime
Achievement
Nominated:
1958 Best Motion Picture Actor - Drama 12
Angry Men
Tony Awards
Won:
1979 Special Award Lifetime Achievement
1948 Best Actor Mister Roberts
Nominated:
1975 Best Actor Clarence Darrow
****
The
above biography has been copied in part or in whole
from an article on
Wikipedia.org
"The Free Encyclopedia." It has been modified under
the GNU Free Document License Section 5 in the
following manner: (1) All links within the article
have been removed, including text links such as
"[#]"; (2) The "[Edit]" text and link have been
removed [if you would like to update the article,
you may do so from the original page]; (3) the table
of Contents links and text have been removed; and
(4) all of the sections of the original article have
not been copied. All of the above text is available
under the terms of the
GNU Free Document License.
URL of Original Article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Fonda
Date Article Copied:
January 2007
We
will try to replace this article with an original
biography in the near future, but we hope this will
be of help to our visitors in the mean time. |
