American screen and stage actor, screenwriter and producer from a noted family, who was a part of the counterculture of the 1960s. He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for “Easy Rider” (1969), and the Academy Award for Best Actor for “Ulee’s Gold” (1997). For the latter, he won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Drama. Fonda also won the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor – Series, Miniseries or Television Film for “The Passion of Ayn Rand” (1999).
The son of actor Henry Fonda and his wife Frances Seymour, Peter and his sister Jane were raised in an emotionally barren environment with a despondent mother and an uncommunicative, absentee father. He was sent to boarding school at age six, and experienced a trauma that no ten-year-old should be subjected to when his mother committed suicide in a hospital while undergoing treatment for depression. Her death was falsified as a heart attack for her children and it wasn’t until years later that Fonda discovered the details of her demise. Nonetheless, the troubled boy shot himself in the stomach and was started on psychiatric counseling.
In high school he found his niche in writing, acting and directing dramatic productions, which pleased his taciturn dad. A difficult adolescent, he decked a teacher in prep school who insulted his dad and was afterward dangerously over medicated with barbiturates by the school doctor. Withdrawing from school at 17, he was taken in by his paternal Aunt Harriet and her husband, Uncle Jack, in Nebraska where he finished high school, entered therapy and enrolled at the University of Omaha.
He left college in 1960 and appeared in summer stock theater in Fishkill, New York. One year later he was in a starring role in the Broadway comedy “Blood, Sweat and Stanley Poole.” A move to Hollywood brought a film debut in “Tammy and the Doctor” in 1963, followed by several screen flops. His big break came in 1969 in the role of Captain America in “Easy Rider,” a film he independently produced and for which he co-wrote the screenplay. It earned him an Oscar nomination and remained a cult favorite for decades.
The landmark success of “Easy Rider” made Fonda a counterculture icon and he dove headlong into the glory road of drug use and sexual freedom. The film was not the beginning of his drug use; he had been arrested for drug possession in 1966. However he failed to establish himself as a star, appearing in low-budget films over the next six years, such as “The Hired Hand,” 1971 and “95 in the Shade,” 1975. He directed and starred with his father in “Wanda Nevada” in 1979. More B movie roles continued in the ’80s, never fulfilling his expectations or matching his movie masterstroke of “Rider” until the 1997 role of an taciturn beekeeper in “Ulee’s Gold” earned him another Oscar nomination for Best Actor.
“I never searched for fame,” he said, “I was born famous and it didn’t serve me well.” A 1998 autobiography titled “Don’t Tell Dad” details the experience of growing up as the son of a famous actor who, on the home-front, was stern and uncommunicative.
Fonda’s first marriage in 1961 to Susan Brewer ended in divorce. They had two children, daughter Bridget in 1964, who became an actress in her own right, and Justin in 1968, a cameraman. In 1975 Fonda married Portia Rebecca “Becky” Crockett McGuane, the great-great-great-great granddaughter of American frontiersman Davey Crockett. They divorced in 2011 and later that year he married Margaret ‘Parky’ DeVogelaere.
In June 2018, Fonda went on Twitter to criticize President Donald Trump’s administration’s enforcement of U.S. immigration policy by Jeff Sessions, specifically regarding the separation of children from their parents at the Mexican border, writing that “We should rip Barron Trump from the arms of First Lady Melania Trump and put him in a cage with pedophiles.” Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee stated that Fonda’s statement about Barron Trump was a violation of federal criminal law. Fonda deleted his tweet regarding Barron Trump, saying that he “immediately regretted it and sincerely apologize to the family for what I said and any hurt my words have caused.”
Fonda died from respiratory failure caused by lung cancer at his home in Los Angeles at 11:05 AM on 16 August 2019 at age 79.
Link to Wikipedia biography