Henry Jaynes Fonda (May 16, 1905–August 12, 1982) was a extremely acclaimed American film, stage, and television actor, best known for his roles when plain-speaking dreamer. Fonda's subtle, naturalistic acting style preceded by many years a popularization of method acting. He was the patriarch of a personal of famed actors, including boy Peter Fonda, daughter Jane Fonda, granddaughter Bridget Fonda, and grandson Troy Garity.

Fonda was innate to William Brace Fonda & Herberta Jaynes. From either his humble upbringing within the Nebraskan Christian Scientist family, Fonda made his mark early as a Broadway actor, and mass produced his Hollywood debut in 1935. Fonda's career gained divergence fallowing 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 when you took a Dust Bowl. Throughout sise decades around Hollywood, Fondthe cultivated the versatile career & a concrete screen image within such classics when The Ox-Bow Incident, Mister Roberts, and 12 Angry Men.

Late inside his life, Fonda moved two toward other challenging & lightly roles inside such heroic poem when Once Upon a Time in the West and family comedies prefer Yours, Mine and Ours. He earned the Tony nomination for his role in 1974's Clarence Darrow (having antecedently won the Tony inside Mister Roberts in 1948), and finished his career sustaining the critically-acclaimed performance within On Golden Pond in 1981, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor. Fonda was besides honored by having "Lifetime Achievement" Academy Awards, Golden Globes, and Tony Awards. He died inside 1982, leaving behind a bequest of classic performances, several of which are then considered the finest examples of the "Golden Age of Hollywood."

Life and Career

Family History and Early life

He was innate within Grand Island, Nebraska to William Brace Fonda and Herberta Krueger Jaynes, observant Christian Scientists. A Fonda personal experienced emigrated westwards from either New York in the 1800s, and might trace its ancestry from either Genoa, Italy, to The Netherlands in the 1500s, and then to the United States of America in the 1600s, where it founded the however-extant town known as Fonda, New York.[http://www.celebritywonder.com/html/henryfonda.html] 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 Italiante 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."[http://www.adherents.com/people/pf/Henry_Fonda.html]

Early career
Along by owning Stewart, Fonda headed for New York City, where them were roomie & honed their skills in Broadway. Fonda appeared inside theatrical productions from either 1926 to 1934, and earned his number 1 film appearance (1935) as a leading human inside 20th Century Fox's screen adaptation of The Farmer Takes a Wife. He reprised his role from a Broadway production of the equivalent title. After Fonda joined Stewart around Hollywood, Fonda shared Stewart's house, & them immature glamourous stars gained the reputation for womanizing.[http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000020/bio]

Fonda's film career blossomed, when he followed higher by having an appearance in The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, a 1st outdoor Technicolor movie, and a lead role around Busy people Single Survive It used to be that, (1937), directed by Fritz Lang. The critical profits paired Bette Davis in the film Jezebel (1938) was followed by the name part in Young Mr. Lincoln and his first collaboration with director John Ford. Fonda's successes sustaining Ford led Ford to recruit him to play "Tom Joad" in the film version of John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath (1940), but the reluctant Darryl Zanuck, who favorite Tyrone Power, insisted on Fonda's signing a vii-season locate the studio, Twentieth Century-Fox.[http://www.filmnight.org/grapes.htm] Fonda agreed, and was in the end nominated for an Oscar for his act in the 1940 film, which numbers of assume to become his finest role. Although his performance is typically utilized among a greatest around Hollywood history, Fonda wwhen edged out by Jimmy Stewart, world health organization won a award for his role as "Macaulay 'Mike' Connor" in The Philadelphia Story. Fonda played opposite Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve (1941), and was acclaimed for his role in The Ox-Bow Incident, but he so enlisted in the Navy to fight in World War II, saying, "I don't want to be in a fake war in a studio."[http://www.usps.com/communications/news/stamps/2005/sr05_025.htm]

Antecedently, he & Stewart got helped raise funds for the defense of Britain from the Nazis.[http://www.tyrone-power.com/article_lifegoestoapary.html] Fonda served for three years, at the start 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.[http://www.fonda.org/military.htm#WW20][http://www.movietreasures.com/main/Henry_Fonda/henry_fonda.html] After the war, Fonda appeared in the film Fort Apache (1948), and his contract with Fox expired. Refusing a second long-long-run studio contract, Fonda returned to Broadway, wearing his have officer's cap to originate a name part within Mister Roberts, a comedy all about a Navy. He won the 1948 Tony Award for the part, & late reprised his performance in the national tour & 1955 film version opposite James Cagney, continuing a pattern of bringing his acclaimed stage roles to life on the large screen. On the placed of Mister Roberts, Fonda come to blows by having John Ford and vowed never to work for him once again. He never did.

Career in the '50s and '60s

When the sextet-season break from either Hollywood, Fonda returned in the critically acclaimed Mister Roberts, as Lt. Douglas Roberts, the role he experienced originated in the play. He followed this profits sustaining a string of classic films, a number one existence the large-budget Paramount Pictures production of the Leo Tolstoy epic War and Peace, in which Fonda played Pierre Bezukhov paired Audrey Hepburn. Fonda worked using Alfred Hitchcock in 1956, playing the human falsely accused of execution in The Wrong Man. Around 1957, Fonda made his 1st raid production by owning 12 Angry Men, based on the script by Reginald Rose and directed by Sidney Lumet. the unbearable film astir xii jurywohuman deciding a fate of a young man accused of slaying was easily-received by critics worldwide. Fonda shared a Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations with coproducer Reginald Rose & won a 1958 BAFTA Award for Best Actor for his performance as a logical "Juror #8." Henry Fondthe vowed that he would never develop a moving picture ever over again. Fallowing the series of average western movies, Fonda returned to the production seat for the NBC series The Deputy, where he as well starred.

The sixties found Fondthe in a total of war & american epic poem, 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 1964 suspense film Fail-Safe'', about possible nuclear holocaust. He besides returned to other weak hearted cinema around 1963's ''Spencer's Mountain, the inspiration for the television program The Waltons'', and 1968's Yours, Mine, and Ours., but Leone experienced worked significant close-higher shots of Fonda's blue eyes into a film.

Fonda's relationship sustaining Jimmy Stewart survived their disagreements above politics—Fondthe was a liberal Democrat, and Stewart the conservative Republican. Fallowing the heated argument, it avoided talking politics using both more. Within 1970, Fonda and Stewart costarred in the western The Cheyenne Social Club, a minor film where them humorously argued politics. Antecedently, it experienced appeared together inside On Our Merry Way, a 1948 comedy featuring Carl "Alfalfa" Switzer which also paired actors William Demarest and Fred MacMurray.[http://www.4alfalfa.com/Alfalfaddendum/merry.html]

Marriages and children
Henry Fonda was married 5 days. His marriage to Margaret Brooke Sullavan in 1931 soon ended around separation, which was finalized in the 1933 divorce. Inside 1936, he married Frances Ford Seymour. It got ii babies, Peter and Jane. Within 1950, Seymour committed suicide. Fonda married around 1950 Susan Blanchard, the stepdaughter of Oscar Hammerstein II. Together, it adopted the girl, Amy (born 1953) [http://fonda.org/gedtree/1028.html], however divorced tercet years late, & around 1957 Fonda married Italian Countess Afdera Franchetti [http://www.grazianoarici.it/oldies/pages/GA016526.htm photo]]. They remained married until 1961. Soon after, Fonda married Shirlee Mae Adams and remained with her for seventeen years, 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."[http://www.fumcsd.org/sermons/sr092798.html] Jane Fonda rejected her father's patriotism and his friendships with actors such as John Wayne, and as a result the father/daughter 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."[http://www.bigmagic.com/pages/blackj/column63j.html] 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." [http://www.bigmagic.com/pages/blackj/column63j.html]

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."[http://www.bigmagic.com/pages/blackj/column63j.html]

Late Career

Despite approaching his seventies, Henry Fonda continued to work in both television and film through the seventies. 1970 found Fonda in three films, the most successful of these ventures being The Cheyenne Social Club. The other two films were Too Late the Hero, which did not feature Henry Fonda in a very important role, and There Was a Crooked Man, about Paris Pitman Jr. (played by Kirk Douglas) trying to escape from an Arizonan 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 72. 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 74. 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 Generation, but the miniseries was overshadowed by its predecessor, Roots. Also in 1976, Fonda starred in the World War II blockbuster Midway.

Like many aging actors, Fonda finished the seventies with a number of disaster movies, which cashed in on big names to drive box office sales. The first of these came in 1977 with the Italian killer octopus thriller Tentacoli (Tentacles) and the mediocre Rollercoaster, which found Fonda cast with Richard Widmark and a young Helen Hunt. He appeared once again with Widmark, Olivia de Havilland, Fred MacMurray, and José Ferrer in the killer bee actioner The Swarm. With the disaster genre's popularity fading, Fonda filmed two last films; first the global disaster, 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 eighties, 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'', and 1981's Summer Solstice, which teamed Fonda with Myrna Loy. This is the last film that Henry Fonda is credited for, and work began on it after the release of On Golden Pond.

Before Summer Solstice was made, however, 1981 brought Fonda's last cinematic film, an adaptation of Ernest Thompson's On Golden Pond. The film, directed by Mark Rydell, provided unprecedented (and, as it turned out, never-to-be-repeated) collaborations between Fonda, Katherine 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 4th On Golden Pond developed enough of an audience to be widely released on January 22nd. Thanks to eleven Academy Award nominations, the film earned nearly $120 million at box office, becoming an unexpected blockbuster. In addition to wins for Hepburn (Best Actress), and Thompson (Screenplay), Pond finally brought Fonda his first, and as fate would have it, his only Oscar for Best Actor (it also earned him a Golden Globe Best Actor award). After Fonda's death, some film critics called his Pond performance "his last and greatest role". Indeed, his performance was the most critically acclaimed of all his roles.

Death and Legacy
Fonda died at his Los Angeles home on August 12, 1982, at the age of 77 after suffering from both heart disease and prostate cancer. Fonda's wife Shirlee and daughter Jane were at his side when he passed away.

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 his 100th birthday, May 16th, 2005, Turner Classic Movies honored him with a marathon of his films. Also in May of 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. [http://www.usps.com/communications/news/stamps/2005/sr05_025.htm]

Filmography
For a detailed filmography, see: 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 the Married woman (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)

Awards

See Also
Notable figures within American films