Henry Fonda

The Man Who Could Not Lie

Henry Fonda came to film by way of someone else's push. In 1925, Marlon Brando's mother talked him into getting on a stage in Omaha, and that gangly kid discovered that acting was the best way to hide his shyness. He wasn't looking for fame, but the camera fell in love with his square jaw and an honesty that was almost jarring.

In 1935 he made his big-screen debut in The Farmer Takes a Wife. Studios saw in him the embodiment of American decency, a comforting value after the Great Depression. His voice was unhurried, and his movements lacked the nervous urgency of other actors of his generation.

His gaze was cinema itself.

But his relationship with success was always distant. He preferred Broadway stages to the spotlight of Los Angeles because theater gave him a control that the final edit took away. So he spent years moving from one medium to another without ever feeling fully at home in the industry.

The shadow of John Ford

Filming The Grapes of Wrath in 1940 changed his status forever. Under Ford's direction, he played Tom Joad and created an archetype of social justice that is still studied in acting schools today. It was a dry performance, stripped of sentimentality.

Then the war came. Fonda enlisted in the Navy in 1942 because he didn't want to be a protected star while others were dying in the Pacific. He served three years and came back with a maturity that shaped his later work.

In 1946 he starred in My Darling Clementine. It is the most lyrical western in history, but the tension between Fonda and Ford eventually destroyed their friendship years later. During the filming of Mister Roberts in 1955, they came to blows and never worked together again.

It was a bitter professional divorce.

The Risk of Producing

Tired of the roles he was being offered, he decided to finance his own projects. In 1957 he produced and starred in 12 Angry Men under the direction of a young Sidney Lumet. The film was shot in just 21 days, and nearly all of it takes place in a suffocating room.

Fonda put up his own money to get it made.

Although critics applauded it, audiences turned their backs on it at its release, and the film lost money on its first run in theaters. But time rescued it. Fonda played Juror No. 8 (a man who questions the blind certainty of the others).

In 1968 he broke his good-guy image. Sergio Leone convinced him to play the villain in Once Upon a Time in the West, and audiences were shocked to see that blue-eyed hero coldly shooting a child. It was a risky move that saved his career from stagnation.

The Final Act

The seventies were a mix of TV movies and theater. His health began to decline, but he maintained iron discipline on every set he stepped onto. His relationship with his children (Jane and Peter) was strained for decades due to his emotional coldness off-screen.

In 1981 he filmed On Golden Pond. It was his only film collaboration with his daughter Jane, and the movie worked as a public catharsis for both of them. The film grossed 119 million dollars in the United States and earned him his only competitive Oscar, for Best Actor.

He could not accept the award in person due to his delicate health. He died in Los Angeles on August 12, 1982 from chronic heart disease.