Except for the elusive, defining role that would make her name a household word and her face instantly recognizable, Bridget Fonda possesses all the requisite qualities of a cinematic superstar-an expressive visage that "looks different from different angles," as she told a writer for Time, talent forged at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute, and lineage as a descendant of the most notable family of American actors since the Barrymores: she is Henry Fonda's granddaughter, Jane Fonda's niece, and Peter Fonda's daughter. Bridget Fonda emerged in 1989 in a trio of movies-Scandal, Strapless, and Shag-in which she played charming sexpots. In the 1990s she began to establish herself as one of the leading actresses of her generation, demonstrating the range of her talent in such diverse films as Cameron Crowe's Singles, Barbet Schroeder's thriller Single White Female, and John Badham's action movie Point of No Return. "She acts in the great tradition of her grandfather, which is less is more," Schroder told Jeffrey Wells, who profiled the actress for the New York Times[August 30, 1992]. "I've never known any actor, except maybe Jermey Irons, who knows so much, who's such a total pro." Badham added, as quoted in the same source, "She has charm, vulnerability, and strength. And she makes the extra effort."
Bridget Jane Fonda was born in Los Angeles on January 27, 1964, the older child of Peter Fonda and Susan [Brewer] Fonda. She was named for Bridget Hayward, a woman her father had loved and who had committed suicide. At the age of five, Bridget traveledwith her father during the filming of Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider [1969], the metaphorical film, about motorcycle-riding hippie-outlaws searching for personal freedom, that made Peter Fonda, who costarred with Hopper and Jack Nicholson, an icon of the counterculture. Aside from that experience, of which Bridget has remembered little more than "goats, and a lot of dirt," she rarely saw her father, whose work frequently kept him on location for long periods of time.
After her parents' divorce, in 1972, Bridget and her brother, Justin, were reared by their mother in the Coldwater Canyon section of Los Angeles, where they had little contact with their father or any of the Fondas. "When I was a kid, the most important thing for me was my home," Bridget Fonda recalled in an interview with Jessica Seigel of the Chicago Tribune [April 25, 1993]. "People would come and go, and things would change, but that place wouldn't. I loved it. I want to have that for the rest of my life. I want to have a place."
When her mother moved to Montana to live with her boyfriend, Bridget was compelled to shuttle between her mother's home and her father's. In her interview with Jeffrey Wells, Fonda admitted that she bore the emotional scars of what she called her "abandonment thing," but she has scrupulously refrained from criticizing her father. "I really get along with him well," she explained when she spoke to Wells. Noting in an interview with Michael Segell for Cosmopolitan [August 1989] that she had had no need to defy her freedom-loving parents in a self-detrimental manner, she explained, "I've just always gone in my own direction and done things in my own way for my own reasons. That's a healthy way of rebelling, because you don't destroy yourself."
While she was still a student, at the exclusive Westlake School for Girls, in Los Angeles, Fonda was cast as Nurse Kelly in a production of the comedy Harvey, an experience that prompted her to seek a career as an actress despite, rather than as a natural consequence of, her background. "My life struggle is going to be trying to establish myself within my family," she told James Kaplan of Rolling Stone [April 20,1989]. "I mean, this is like we have a little tiny cottage-and two skyscrapers. And who's gonna get the sun? It's something that, just by deciding that I wanted to be an actress, I set myself up for." Some of her teachers cautioned her not to expect any special treatment, but Fonda perceived such overcompensation for her family legacy as just another form of being treated differently from her classmates.
Fonda also resented the implication that acting was in her blood. Not only had she refused to solicit acting tips and advice from her famous relatives, she had worked hard to learn her craft, studying Method acting at New York University's celebrated Lee Strasberg Theatre institute for four years. For the first two years, she suffered from stage fright and self-consciousness that were exacerbated by the extra scrutiny she was under because of her name. "When you've got all eyes on you, people saying, 'She's not so hot,' you sort of wish you were a nobody," she told a reporter for People [Spring 1990]. But in her third year she learned to subordinate her concern for others' opinions to her desire to do what she thought was best for any given assignment. "Once I was able to make myself look like a fool, I was no longer scared," she told Michael Segell.
Fonda made her screen debut as one of the lovers in Franc Roddam's seven-and-a-half-minute segment of the multi-director experimental opera anthology Aria [1987], in which she and her partner engage in passionate sex to the accompaniment of the "Liebestod," from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, in a Las Vegas hotel room before slashing their wrists. In 1988 she appeared in a production of Just Horrible that was mounted by the Manhattan Class Company; played Sissy in Class 1 Acts at the Nat Horne Theatre in New York City; and was featured in A Confession, at the Warren Robertson Workshop, and in Pastels, at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute. She had her first speaking part in a mainstream movie in Richard Martini's forgettable You Can't Hurry Love [1988], in which she took the role of Peggy Kellogg, a likable woman who works for a dating agency and introduces a naive young man from Ohio to the outrageous anomalies of life in contemporary Los Angeles.
It was in 1989 that Fonda made a name for herself, in three movies. In Michael Caton-Jones's acclaimed Scandal [1989], a sensational treatment of the so-called Profumo affair, which rocked British politics in the early 1960s, Fonda portrayed Mandy Rice-Davis, a sixteen-year-old London showgirl who is tutored in aristocratic manners by Stephen Ward [John Hurt], an upper-crust Pygmalion who introduces her and her friend, Christine Keeler [Joanne Whalley-Kilmer], to high-born men in important government positions. When Keeler's affairs with John Profumo [Ian McKellen], the secretary of state for war, and Eugene Ivanov [Jeroen Krabbe*], a Soviet naval attache* and intelligence agent, are revealed in the tabliod press, a scandal ensues that leads ti the resignation of the disgraced Profumo and the eventual fall of the Tory government headed by Prime Minister Harold Macmillan.
Most reviewers praised the movie's atmosphere and performances but lamented the lack of character development and the shifts in tone. The veteran critic Pauline Kael, in her review for the New Yorker [May 15, 1989], found Scandal to be a "sentimental docudrama" that had sacrificed the "rich comic possibilities in the sort of self-loathing man [Ward] who's sexually turned on by being in close proximity to wealth and power"; stilll, she declared that Fonda's "dryness" had "a provocative, taunting assertivness" that makes one aware of "how sickly-holy the film's point of view is." Jack Kroll called Fonda's and Whalley-Kilmer's performances "delicious, . . . capturing perfectly the mischievous muses of a new permissiveness," and Peter Travers wrote in his evaluation for Rolling Stone [May 18, 1989] that Fonda was "a comic delight."
Although the British rock-video director Zelda Barron's Shag [1989] was widely considered to be a routine teens-at-the-beach romp, Fonda was judged memorable in the role of Melaina Buller, who hopes to attract the attention of pop star Jimmy Valentine by entering a beauty contest. Fonda, Hal Hinson wrote in the Washington Post [July 21, 1989], contributed "something . . . potent, something altogether her own. This icy blond actress . . . who earlier this year provided the best moments in the British film Scandal, has startingly confident camera presence. She takes over her scenes naturally-through sheer animal vigor, she makes it impossible to look at anyone else." A writer for Variety [August 24, 1989] wrote that Fonda "exudes confidence and star quality and looks destined for great things."
In Strapless [1989], a contemporary sociopolitical drama that was written and directed by the British playwright David Hare, Fonda essayed the part of Amy Hempel, the party-going younger sister of Lilian Hempel [Blair Brown], a humanistic American doctor working in London in the 1980s, at the height of Thatcherism. With the exception of David Sterritt of the Christian Science Monitor [July 26, 1990], most critics complained that the fictional narritive took a back seat to Hare's political concerns and inflated metaphors [the women learn that they cannot depend on men and must be self-supporting, like the strapless gowns Amy designs]. "Both Miss Brown and Miss Fonda have done far better work elsewhere," Vincent Canby wrote in the New York TImes [September 23, 1989]. "In Strapless, they are competent without ever being exciting, which is the nature of the film." Also in 1989 Fonda appeared in three television sequences: an episode of Fox's 21 Jump Street, a segment of HBO's The Edge, entitled "Professional Man," and a PBS WonderWorks tale called "Jacob Have I Loved."
Fonda's next major role was that of Mary Godwin, the author of Frankenstein and the future wife of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, in Roger Corman's Frankenstein Unbound [1990]. Most of Corman's humorously intended, quasi-futuristic horror film was set on the shores of Lake Geneva, in Switzerland, where Godwin and her betrothed [Michael Hutchence, of the rock group INXS] enjoy an idyllic holiday with Lord Byron [Jason Patric] and Dr. Victor Frankenstein [Raul Julia] until a scientist from the twenty-first century [John Hurt] stumbles into their lives. In his review for the New York Times [November2, 1990], Vincent Canby chided Fonda, whom he described as "ordinarily a charming actress," for playing Mary "as if she were Annette Funicello in an early-nineteenth-century nlond fright wig." Although her character was on-screen in only a few scenes, Fonda was, by all accounts, more effective in her portrayal of a sexy reporter trying to get an interview with Michael Corleone [Al Pacino] in The Godfather. Part III [1990], the concluding film in Francis Ford Coppola's brooding, epic trilogy about power, family, and corruption in America.
In 1991 Fonda completed several small projects, including a cameo in Drop Dead Fred, a part in Pie in the Sky, and roles in two films that seem to have gone straight to home-video release: Lee Drysdale's Leather Jackets, costarring Cary Elwes and D. B. Sweeney, and Gary Winick's Out of the Rain in which she took the part of an incest victim/murderer. In the crime thriller Iron Maze [1991], Hiroaki Yoshida's homage to Akira Kurosawa'a classic film about multiple versions of the truth, Rashomon [1951], Fonda played the wife od a Japanese business tycoon, who is trying to build an amusement park in a depressed American mill town, Although John Anderson of New York Newsday [Novemeber 1, 1991] felt that Fonda was "convincing largely because her physical beauty lies somewhere between the American and Japanese ideals," a reviewer for People [November 11, 1991] complained that she had underplayed her role. In the same year, the actress had a supporting role in Michael Caton-Jones's Doc Hollywood, a vehicle ofr Michael J. Fox.
Fonda had more success with the celebrated European filmmaker Barbet Schroeder's Single White Female [1992]. Based on John Lutz's novel SWF Seeks Same, the film combined elements from psychological art films such as Ingmar Bergman's Persona with stock devices from low-grade slasher flicks like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Fonda starred as Allison Jones, a successful young Manhattanite who takes in a roommate, the mousy Hedra Calson [Jennifer Jason Leigh], after breaking up with her live-in boyfriend. At first the charming new roommate fills a void in Allison's life, but as time passes Hedra slowly begins to adopt as her own certain aspects of the glamorous Allison's personality and appearance. Although many critics felt that the film was marred by the excessive violence of its climactic scene, Manohla Dargis of the Village Voice [August 18, 1992] contended that Schroeder had solicited "Fonda's most expressive performance to date," and in the New York Times [August 14, 1992] Vincent Canby declared, "Both actresses are exceptionally good."
In Cameron Crowe's Singles [1992], a clever, well-received film about a group of unsettled men and women in their early twenties trying to come to terms with incipient adulthood in contemporary Seattle, Fonda portrayed Janet Livermore, an underemployed architect who works as a coffee-shop waitress and gets invloved with a dim-witted rock musician [Matt Dillon]. Writing in the New York Times [October 4, 1992], Janet Maslin credited Fonda with having created an "enchanting" character in Singles, and John Anderson of New York Newsday [September 18, 1992] applauded her for turning in "yet another smart performance." Jim Farber, in his evaluation of the same date for the New York Daily News, held that Fonda's "earnest charm" lent credibility to her character's ignorance of her own beauty. "Fonda's way with a line," he continued, "goes a long way toward transcending her dialogue, which verges on the . . . cliched."
Fonda's next two films, Point of No Return and Bodies, Rest, and Motion, were released in 1993. Point of No Return, John Badham's largely unsuccessful remake of Luc Besson's 1989 film La Femme Nikita, about a female criminal programmed by scientists to become a hardened government assassin, stared Fonda in the role of the undercover assassin, Maggie, whose increasingly dangerous assignments begin to intrude on her personal life after she falls in love with the pleasant young man [Dermot Mulroney] who managesher apartment building. Most critics echoed the sentiments of Susan Wloszcyzna, who wrote in USA Today [March 19, 1993] that the "fair-of-face Fonda is more debutante of death than lethal weapon." In a scathing review of the film in the Village Voice [March 30, 1993], Georgia Brown wrote, "Point of No Return makes you wonder why you thought the wispy Fonda could act. Exactly contrary to the point she seems more and more of a robot as the movie goes on." But Todd McCarthy of Variety [March 22, 1993], noting that her role required everything from "streetwise toughness and cold-blodded purposefulness to sophisticated glamour and romantic vulnerability," found that "Fonda acquits herself admirably in all departments."
Hailed as the quintessential film in the energing genre of movies chronicling the coming-of-age of the lost, drifting members of so-called Generation X, Michael Steinberg's Bodies, Rest, and Motion [1993] took its title from Newton's first law of motion, which states that a body at rest or in motion will remain so until acted upon by an independent force. Fonda portrayed Beth, a waitress in a small Arizona town who is involved with Nick [Tim Roth], a television salesman. Beth's intrest in Nick wanes when he asks her to move with him to Montana; remaining in Arizona, she meets a romantic young house painter [Eric Stoltz], who immediately falls in love with the wary Beth. Although the performances turned in by the film's cast, including a cameo by a motorcycle-riding Peter Fonda, recieved generous praise, most reviewers agreed with the assessment of the New York Times's Caryn James, who called Bodies, Rest and Motion "uneven." "The film is a mix of wonderful acting," ahe wrote in her evaluation of April 18, 1993, "revealing gestures and bits of dialogue that suddenly become top-heavy and portentous, throwing the whole movie out of whack." Reviewing the film for Variety [February 1, 1993], Todd McCarthy thought that Fonda "comes off as well as ever, suggesting depths of unarticulated uncertainties and embodying the lack of character definition that is central to the film's concerns."
by 1994 Fonda had become one of Hollywood's busiest actresses. That year alone saw the release of three new films in which she starred. In Bernardo Bertolucci's Little Buddha, she and the pop singer-songwriter Chris Isaak played a middle-class Seattle couple whose ordinary lives are disrupted when a visiting monk tells them that their son may be a reincarnated Tibetan lama. [A parallel plot line featured Keanu Reeves as Siddhartha Gautama, the Indian prince who founded Buddhism around 500 B.C. when he renounced a life of luxury in search of the Middle Way of buddhist truth.] Although reviews of the film were mixed, most critics found Fonda's and Isaak's acting bland and impassive, but they tended to attribute the tone of the performances less to the actors than to the mood created by Bertolucci, who seemed more intrested in sumptuous sinematography that in characterization. As an unremittingly kind-hearted waitress who falls in love with a compulsively honest police officer [Nicholas Cage] after he splits the proceeds of his winning lottey ticket with her in Andrew Bergman's It Could Happen to You, Fonda turned in a pleasant performance that rendered the fairy tale [which was based loosely on a true story] interesting, even if it did not transcend the one-dimensionality of her character, accroding to most critics. Fonda also costarred with Anthony Hopkins and Matthew Broderick in Alan Parker's The Road to Wellville, whish was based on the 1993 novel of the same name by T. Coraghessan Boyle and released late in October 1994.
According to Peter Fonda, his daughter is the most talented member of the Fonda clan including his father, whose skill Bridget has said she aspires to attain. "I'm never completely happy with what I do on screen," she admitted to Jeffrey Wells of the New York Times. "What comes out is never as good as I think it'll be, or hope it'll be." Noting that "there are similarities between Ms. Fonda and her grandfather Henry," Wells cited "her low-key acting style and work habits, [which] mirror the older Fonda's obsession with work during the late thirties and forties." Bridget Fonda is less compulsive than her grandfather, however, as she can, while she can. She just knows what she wants." "You can't count on fame or popularity," Bridget Fonda said when she spoke to the Chicago Tribune's Jessica Seigel. "There are people who work wheir whole lives because they pace themselves, and that's the way I want to be." Fonda divides her time between homes in New York City and Los Angeles. As of 1991 she drove a brown 1976 Cadillac El Dorado that she has described affectionately as "completely American; totally excessive."
My personal favourite Fonda film is The Assassin, in which she plays a ruthless assassin, with no emotion, and basicall kills everyone in sight! It is an excellent film, and I would strongly recommend viewing of this masterpiece! Also called Point of no return.