NAME: Henry Fonda
BORN: 19/05/1905
BIRTH PLACE: Nebraska, USA
DIED: 12/08/1982
BIOGRAPHY
Henry Fonda began his acting career with the Omaha Community Playhouse, a local amateur theatre troupe directed by Dorothy Brando (mother of Marlon Brando).
He moved to the Cape Cod University Players and later Broadway, to expand his theatrical career from 1926 to 1934.
His first major roles on Broadway included ‘New Faces of America’ and ‘The Farmer Takes a Wife’. The latter play was transferred to the screen in 1935, and marked the beginning of Fonda’s Hollywood career.
The following year he married Frances Seymour Fonda, with whom he had two children: Jane and Peter Fonda, who also went on to become screen stars.
He is most remembered for his roles as Abe Lincoln in ‘Young Mr. Lincoln’ and Tom Joad in ‘The Grapes of Wrath’, for which he received an Academy Award Nomination.
He gave one of his best performances as a hired killer, in Sergio Leone’s ‘Once Upon a Time in the West’, in 1968.
During a Barbara Walters interview, Jane Fonda claimed that her father was deeply in love with Lucille Ball and that the two were “very close” during the filming of ‘Yours, Mine and Ours’ in 1968.
More recently, Fonda received an Academy Award for Best Actor, for his role as Norman Thayer, in ‘On Golden Pond’, in 1981.
Fonda’s hobby was making model airplanes and kites, and he was famously honest and self-effacing. He once said, “I hope you won’t be disappointed. You see I am not a very interesting person. I haven’t ever done anything except be other people. I ain’t really Henry Fonda!”
Henry Fonda is considered one of Hollywood’s old-time legends, and was a friend and contemporary of James Stewart, John Ford and Joshua Logan, with a career which spanned almost 50 years in film and television.
He died of a heart-attack in 1982.