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Henry Fonda

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   Henry Fonda
   Henry Fonda in the classic 1957 film 12 Angry Men.
   Birth name    Henry Jaynes Fonda
   Born          May 16, 1905
                 Grand Island, Nebraska
   Died          August 12, 1982
   Notable roles Abraham Lincoln in Young Mr. Lincoln
                 Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath
                 Wyatt Earp in My Darling Clementine
                 Lt. Col. Owen Thursday in Fort Apache
                 Emmanuel Balestrero in The Wrong Man
                 Juror #8 in 12 Angry Men
                 Frank in Once Upon a Time in the West
                 Norman in On Golden Pond

   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, the American Film Institute named Fonda among the Greatest
   Male Stars of All Time, ranking at No. 6.

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 ). 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 ).

   As a youth in Nebraska, Fonda was active in the Boy Scouts of America
   as a youth and was a Scoutmaster, but was not an Eagle Scout as some
   report.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 ),
   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. Pons was
   a coloratura soprano who could sing a high "F" note. She was credited
   with saving the MET during the great depression.

   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 ( ). 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" ( ).

   Previously, he and Stewart had helped raise funds for the defense of
   Britain from the Nazis ( ). 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
   ( , ).

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.

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
   ).

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 in 1950 Susan Blanchard, the stepdaughter of Oscar Hammerstein
   II. Together, they adopted a daughter, Amy (born 1953) ( ), but
   divorced three years later. In 1957 Fonda married Italian Countess
   Afdera Franchetti ( ). 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" ( ). His daughter,
   Jane, rejected her father's friendships with right-wingers such as
   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."

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 ).

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
                            Awards
    Preceded by:
   Robert De Niro
   for Raging Bull Academy Award for Best Actor
                   1981
                   for On Golden Pond          Succeeded by:
                                               Ben Kingsley
                                               for Gandhi

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