The actor who changed Jane Fonda’s life: “A fabulous drunk and a wonderful human being”
Few people have as much insight into the world of Hollywood as Jane Fonda. The daughter of legendary actor Henry Fonda, both Jane and her brother Peter went on to have their own stellar careers on the silver screen. She’s been in the business pretty much since birth and has the awards and adulation to show for it. Even in the mid-2020s, with Fonda approaching her 90th birthday, she is still regularly appearing in movies and TV shows.
This extraordinary life has given Fonda the chance to rub elbows with some of the most famous people to have ever lived. As a young performer, she was mentored by some of the stars of her father’s generation and those who had come through a few years later. One of them was Lee Marvin, whom she acted opposite in the 1965 comedy Western Cat Ballou. According to a conversation with Vulture, the classic movie tough guy had a profound effect on her.
“Lee Marvin was fabulous,” she said. “He was very funny, and he was always drunk. We stayed at the same motel, and they had to carry him up the stairs… At one point, my tooth got knocked out, and they didn’t stop shooting – they just shot me from the back. He took me aside and said, ‘Fonda, we’re the stars of this movie. If we allow them to work us so many hours, we’re not the ones that get hurt – it’s the crew. We have to stand up for the workers. That was a huge lesson from Lee Marvin, who wasn’t a revolutionary. He was a fabulous drunk and a wonderful human being.”
He might have had a reputation for playing tough-as-nails antiheroes in movies like Point Blank and The Dirty Dozen, but in real life, Marvin was a real sweetheart. A staunch Democrat and supporter of John F. Kennedy, he was one of the first major celebrities to endorse gay rights, doing so in a 1969 interview with Playboy.
In Cat Ballou, he plays two different characters; Tim Strawn, a gunslinger hired to kill the father of Fonda’s character; and Kid Shelleen, a former fighter-turned-drunk. Despite Fonda’s initial fears that it would flop, the movie is now a classic, widely regarded as one of the finest Westerns ever made, comedy or otherwise. It also earned Marvin the ‘Best Actor’ award at the Oscars.
Fonda clearly took lessons from Marvin’s charitable nature, as she would go on to become one of the most outspoken actors-turned-activists in history. Her anti-Vietnam war stance earned her a spot on Hollywood’s blacklist, and she was even placed under surveillance by the British spy agency GCHQ as a result. She has campaigned on everything from the Iraq war to LGBTQ+ rights to the environment. In 2024, she was one of many celebrities who signed an open letter urging politicians to hold artificial intelligence companies more accountable.
Nothing about Marvin’s on-screen persona conveyed any of what the man was like in real life, but Fonda had the extreme privilege of getting to know him in person. Though they would never work together again, it’s clear that she was inspired by him in all aspects of her life. All of this goes to show that you should never judge a book by its cover, even if that book is threatening you with a revolver.
