The actress and activist gave up her film career and renounced feminism, to become a house-trained corporate spouse. The couple divorced after 10 years, but more in sorrow than anger, amid the realisation by Fonda that, in her early 60s, she had finally found herself, that she had “grown up and healed”. It changed me and affected me very deeply.” The enduring Jane Fonda is laid bare: passionate, committed (occasionally misguidedly so), but unfailingly – and often brutally – honest about herself.These days, she says, she often winces when she sees her earlier films such as Cat Ballou, made in 1965. (“A wonderful movie, but I was really bad.”) Then, of course, came Barbarella, the fatuous intergalactic romp made by French director Roger Vadim in 1968, in which she plays a female astronaut hopping from planet to planet, surviving exotic sexual encounters with monsters, angels and others. The film marked the end of Fonda’s sex-kitten phase, and of Vadim’s bid to become a major player in Hollywood, with Fonda as his vehicle.But if her relationship with Vadim failed, first professionally and then personally, the episode speaks volumes about Fonda the woman, and her attitude to men The director became her first husband in 1965 He wanted to mould her as his own – and Fonda went along. Much the same happened with Hayden, and then with her third husband Ted Turner, the media tycoon whom she married, to much astonishment, in 1991. It was never my intention,” she told the television interviewer Barbara Walters in 2001.

But, Fonda explained, “I went from a person trying to be pretty and trying to be popular .. The Vietnam War turned a lot of young people inside out We felt betrayed by our own country. However, in an interview yesterday she put a single item at the top of that list: “A £1m ruby-studded bra.”This extravagant gesture is in line with what the Welsh pocket diva said last week: “I want to live life to the full There’s no point leaving millions. But the very use of the picture is testament to Fonda’s enduring power to inflame passions. The Vietnam war ended three decades ago and is universally agreed to have been a colossal blunder. Even so, many people are still shocked by the memory of Fonda – Oscar-winning daughter of one of America’s most venerated actors – flying with the left-wing activist Tom Hayden (later to become her second husband) to Hanoi in 1972.That July, she went on North Vietnamese radio to urge American soldiers to desert; she peered through the sights of an anti-aircraft gun aimed at US planes, and accused her countrymen of war crimes. The real one has a young Kerry, war hero turned war protester, listening intently at some other rally at the time, three rows behind the unmistakable figure of Fonda.There is no evidence the pair even exchanged words on that occasion, let alone knew each other well.

There were calls for her to be tried for treason, even to be executed To this day, most Vietnam veterans cannot stand her. Small wonder Republicans believe that, even three decades on, tarring Kerry by association with “Hanoi Jane” still has political mileage.However, that is but one facet of Fonda, for which she has amply and long since apologised “It just kills me I did things that hurt those men. The other is a Fonda redux, a ghost of Vietnam returned to haunt the current presidential election campaign.
This latter in turn is a tale of two photos, one true and one false, both of them seized upon by the Bush campaign to discredit the Vietnam war veteran and likely Democratic nominee John Kerry. One, a montage purporting to show Kerry and Fonda sharing a platform at an anti-war meeting in the early 1970s, has been revealed as a smear straight out of the Joseph Stalin playbook of doctored photos. This week, two Fonda incarnations have been back in the headlines. One is Thoroughly Modern Jane, leading a delegation of the V-Day feminist movement last week to Guatemala and Mexico to protest the scourge of violence against women. Indeed you can make a strong case that, as much as or more than any other single individual, she embodies the twists and turns of American history in the second half of the 20th century – its tensions and its obsessions, its traumas and its vanities.