Jane Fonda Calls On Hollywood To Fight During This Difficult Time As She Accepts SAG Career Honor
In a fiery speech, Jane Fonda accepted the SAG Life Achievement Award at the 31st annual SAG Awards Sunday, first thanking SAG-AFTRA and her fellow actors amid a standing ovation and raucous cheers and applause. “This means the world to me,” she said. “Your enthusiasm makes it seem, I don’t know, less like a late twilight of my life and more like a go-girl kickass. Which is good, because I’m not done!” the 87-year-old two-time Oscar winner exclaimed.
Fonda is the 60th person to receive the Life Achievement Award, given to an actor who fosters “the finest ideals of the acting profession” as it recognizes both career and humanitarian accomplishments.
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Fonda took the stage to accept the award following a presentation by Julia Louis-Dreyfus and montage of clips from her films, including her Oscar winning roles in Klute and Coming Home, as well as 9 to 5, Julia, The China Syndrome, The Newsroom and many more.
Her impassioned speech was plagued by sound issues, at one point when a pre-recorded announcer interrupted her saying, “Here at the 31st…” before it was cut off. She laughed it off, then quipped “I can conjure up voices!” as she flexed her arms in a good-natured sign of strength.
The actor reflected on her “un-strategic” and “really weird career” over the past several decades, including retiring for 15 years and coming back at 65, calling herself “a late bloomer” in show business.
She went on to praise the unions, saying “they have all our backs, they bring us into community and they give us power. Community means power and this is really important right now when workers’ power is being attacked and community is being weakened.”
She noted, “SAG-AFTRA is different than most other unions, because us, the workers, we don’t manufacture anything tangible. What we create is empathy. Our job is to understand another human being so profoundly that we can touch their souls.”
She spoke to the characters actors play. “While you may hate the behavior of your character, you have to understand with the traumatized person you’re playing,” adding empathy “is not weak or woke, and by the way, woke just means you give a damn about other people.”
Not one to shy away from politics and without mentioning our current president by name, she said, in terms of empathy, “a whole lot of people are going to be hurt by what is happening, what is coming our way.” And of those who are of a different political persuasion, “We need to call upon our empathy and not judge but listen from our hearts and the world.”
Fonda noted her first movie in 1958 was made at the end of McCarthyism “when so many careers were destroyed. Today, it’s helpful to remember though that Hollywood resists”, and she urged everyone to take on the fight. “We are in our documentary moment,” she warned. “This is it, and it’s not a rehearsal. This is it, and we mustn’t for a moment kid ourselves about what is happening. This is big time serious folks, so let’s be brave.”
She closed with a plea. “We must not isolate. We must stay in community. We must help the vulnerable. We must find ways to to project an inspiring vision of the future, one that is beckoning, welcoming, that will help people believe that to quote the novelist Pearl Cleage, ‘on the other side of the conflagration there will still be love, there will still be beauty, and there will be an ocean of truth for us to swim in.’ Let’s make it so,” she added, concluding, “Thank you for this encouragement. Thank you.”
You can watch her entire speech above.
Fonda, across a six-decade career in film, TV and theater, won her Oscars for Klute in 1971 and 1978’s Coming Home, adding and Emmy and seven Golden Globes. Her film credits include They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, The China Syndrome, On Golden Pond and 9 to 5. In 2023 alone, she appeared in four films, capped by 80 For Brady alongside Lily Tomlin, Sally Field, and Rita Moreno — all previous SAG Life Achievement winners.
Her TV credits include her Emmy-winning turn in 1984’s The Dollmaker, along with The Newsroom and Grace and Frankie, where she co-starred alongside Tomlin.
She also received the 2015 AFI Life Achievement Award, and the Golden Globes’ career honor the Cecil B. DeMille Award, and for her longtime activism and philanthropy saw the Women in Film Jane Fonda Humanitarian Award named after her.
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