Jane Fonda / Life's third act

 

Jane Fonda : Life's third act

There have been many revolutions over the last century, but perhaps none as significant as the longevity revolution. We are living on average today 34 years longer than our great-grandparents did -- think about that. That's an entire second adult lifetime that's been added to our lifespan. And yet, for the most part, our culture has not come to terms with what this means. We're still living with the old paradigm of age as an arch. That's the metaphor, the old metaphor. You're born, you peak at midlife and decline into decrepitude.

Peter Fonda in Easy Rider.

Peter Fonda, celebrated actor known for Easy Rider, dies aged 79

Son of Henry Fonda and brother of Jane Fonda died after battling lung cancer, family says

THE GUARDIAN

Friday 16 August 2019

The actor Peter Fonda has died at the age of 79 following a battle with lung cancer, his family has said.

Fonda, who co-wrote, produced and starred in the classic 1969 road movie Easy Rider, died peacefully at his home in Los Angeles on Friday, his family said in a statement.He was the son of Henry Fonda and younger brother of Jane Fonda.

A statement from his family said: “It is with deep sorrow that we share the news that Peter Fonda has passed away.

 ‘Oh, I just feel damn lucky. I retired for 15 years. I left at 50 and came back at 65’: Jane Fonda. Photograph: Arthur Mola/

Jane Fonda: ‘I’m 80! I keep pinching myself. I can’t believe it!’

Jane Fonda is as outspoken, mischievous and political as ever. She talks to Sophie Heawood about racism, cosmetic surgery and the joys of working again with Robert Redford

Sophie Heawood

Sunday 27 May 1018

Jane Fonda has ruined me. I never want to interview anyone under the age of 80 again. Specifically, I never want to interview anyone who isn’t 80, and who doesn’t phone me for a catch-up call from a limo in Cannes, in which they are being driven to the airport, having gone to a deeply glamorous film festival party the night before and now finding themselves, as Fonda puts it delicately, “slightly hungover”. Fonda isn’t even hugely interested in Cannes these days, not like back in the day “when people wore their own clothes and went there to talk about movies”.

Paolo Sorrentino: ‘I never use a crude approach to showing the naked bodies of older people’

After winning an Oscar for The Great Beauty, the director had the pick of Hollywood for his next film, Youth. Why was he so keen on persuading the British veteran Michael Caine to step up?

Andrew Pulver
Friday 15 January 2016 08.10 GMT

F

rance has some of the toughest anti-smoking laws in Europe, but they don’t cut much ice with Paolo Sorrentino. Having taken over an upstairs bar in Paris’s St-Germain-des-Prés to hold court, the Oscar-winning film-maker is openly puffing on what can only be described as a stogie. Coupled with a pair of unexpectedly luxuriant sideburns, Sorrentino looks like he might have just staggered off the set of a Sam Peckinpah western – which, you suspect, is just how he would like it.

The 50 best films of 2015 / Youth / 48

The 50 best films 

of 2015 

in the US  

No 48 

Youth

Youth review - age cannot wither Michael Caine, but Sorrentino could try harder

***

Michael Caine is excellent as a retired composer opposite Harvey Keitel and Jane Fonda in this strangely sweet-natured opera of pathos

Peter Bradshaw
Wednesday 20 May 2015 11.45 BST

P

aolo Sorrentino’s new movie set in a Swiss sanatorium is a diverting, minor work, tweaked up with funny ideas and images and visually as stylish as ever. There are brilliant flourishes here that could only have come from Sorrentino: superb swooping camera moves, grotesque faces and angular perspectives, and it always watchable. But it’s beset with Sorrentino’s occasional fanboy weakness for pop-star cameos — Paloma Faith appears here, playing herself and not earning her keep. Youth has a wan eloquence and elegance, though freighted with sentimentality and a strangely unearned and uninteresting macho-geriatric regret for lost time, lost film projects, lost love and all those beautiful women that you never got to sleep with. The title has literary resonances with Conrad and Tolstoy, but the youth evoked is mostly that of young women and young women’s bodies, whose allure never fades for men as they get older.

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In Jaco van Dormael’s peppy, inventive comedy, everyone gets a text message from the Almighty, while “JC”’s sister gathers a gang of disciples

 

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It is all incarnated

It is all incarnated in Michael Caine, whose face here is an inscrutable mask of worldly disillusion, breaking occasionally into a droll smile: he plays retired British composer Fred Ballinger, currently fending off requests from the Palace to conduct a special Royal Command performance of his early masterpiece Simple Songs. (Fred is supposed to have been an intimate of Stravinsky’s — but this music sounds more like Britten pastiche.) He is undergoing a health check-up at this luxurious state-of-the-art sanatorium, although as he says: “At my age, getting in shape is a waste of time.”

Fred is there with his best buddy Mick (Harvey Keitel) an ageing movie director, here with his production team, brainstorming a new film set to star his old diva friend, played by Jane Fonda. Mick’s son is married to Fred’s daughter and assistant Leda (Rachel Weisz) who actually shares her dad’s bedroom. There is also an LA movie actor Boyle (Paul Dano), another sufferer from that popular condition: self-congratulatory cynicism, who is preparing for a certain historical role, and astonishes everyone at the spa by appearing one morning in full costume and makeup. The two old guys, Mick and Fred, go into a kind of arthouse version of Statler and Waldorf, and they stroll around the grounds, grumping away, torturing themselves by whingeing about their prostate worries and perving over the current Miss Universe (Madalina Diana Ghenea) who has won a stay here as part of her prize and turns out to be smarter than anyone thought.

There has already been much comment online to the effect that Caine is playing the kind of role that might otherwise have gone to Sorrentino’s longtime collaborator Toni Servillo, and it’s true that Caine’s air of sticken ennui does remind you of Servillo. But actually Caine is very good in the role, he brings something different, a distant fatherly charm.

If only the film was not so (mostly) marooned in that single location. When the action cuts to memories and fantasies of Venice, where Fred conducted an orchestra, the film suddenly comes alive with power and movement: there is a stunning tableau of St Mark’s Square underwater. Even a very quick scene with Jane Fonda losing her temper on a plane frees things up a bit: but mostly we are drifting around the handsome facilities and grounds of this sumptuous but weirdly soulless open prison with its massages and its heated pools.

There is a poetic richness in Youth which occasionally emerges as Mick and Fred talk about what they can remember of their lives, and Mick’s realisation that there are huge stretches of his own life that he can simply no longer remember: his own youth is more or less a complete blank. It is an idea which is more terrifying than piquant: more disturbing, arguably, than anything Mastroianni’s director faced in 8 ½ — though he himself had youth more or less on his side.

Sorrentino has a basic level of fluency and verve. Anything that this film-maker places in front of his camera is always arresting to some extent: there is a superb shot in which Fred and Mick spy on an elderly couple having sex in a forest: a shot replete with comedy, absurdity and alienation. I am already looking forward to another more substantial Sorrentino film, though there is pathos here, and sweetness.

THE GUARDIAN

Roman Polanski writes foreword to book about murdered wife, Sharon Tate

Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate

Roman Polanski writes foreword to book about murdered wife, Sharon Tate

Jane Fonda and Joan Collins also contribute to volume about actor, who was killed by followers of Charles Manson in 1969

Ben Child
The Guardian, Tuesday 27 May 2013

Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate in 1969, the year she was killed at her LA home by members of Charles Manson's 'family'. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

The Oscar-winning director Roman Polanski has written the foreword to a forthcoming book about the life of his murdered wife, Sharon Tate, reports the New York Post..

Tate was killed by followers of Charles Manson in 1969, along with three friends who were staying with her at the Los Angeles home she shared with her husband. The 26-year-old actor was due to give birth just two weeks after her death.

Polanski, who was out of town when the attacks took place, writes in the foreword: "Even after 40 years, it is difficult to write about Sharon. It is impossible, of course, to imagine what might have been if Sharon had lived. But this book allows me to remember what was."

The book, titled Recollection, has been put together by Sharon's sister Debra and will be published in the US next month. It also features contributions from its subject's co-stars on the 1967 cult drama Valley of the Dolls, Patty Duke, Joan Collins and Jane Fonda. The last writes: "She was very pregnant the last time I saw her at that house and turned down a joint that was being passed around."

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