Jane Fonda - “I'm Still A Work In Progress”

At 82, activist and award-winning actor Jane Fonda tells Juliet Rieden she’s finally embracing what she calls “the whole Jane” without husbands or lovers to please.

- Juliet Rieden

In a fire-engine red wool coat purchased “on sale at Neiman Marcus [department store]” for maximum impact – and warmth – her hands waving aloft and lashed together with sharp, plastic zip-lock cuffs, octogenarian actor Jane Fonda is out of her comfort zone but in her element. From Capitol Hill she bellows thanks to BAFTA for the Stanley Kubrick Britannia Award for Excellence in Film as police lead her away to the jailhouse.

It’s a scene that lit up news channels around the world last October and featured in the iconic actor’s acceptance video, played with pomp and glory on a big screen at the Beverly Hills BAFTA gala she couldn’t attend. To the uninitiated it looked like a piece of choreographed theatre, filmed in Washington D.C. perhaps for a new role in a political thriller. But Jane Fonda was – and is – deadly serious; this is a crisis not a drama and Jane’s new life’s work, so buckle up!

She was in the throes of being arrested for civil disobedience, together with her daughter, Vanessa Vadim (from her first marriage to the late French film director, Roger Vadim), and Sam Waterston, her co-star in the TV comedy series Grace and Frankie, part of an impeccably executed series of protests against the government’s inaction on climate change called Fire Drill Fridays. Together with Greenpeace, Jane Fonda had launched a vital new movement and accepting the award from her activist’s platform was a piece of genius. “I hoped it would inspire more celebrities to join us,” says Jane. It did!