The yr was 1970. Jane Fonda had simply completed filming the crime thriller Klute. On her method dwelling from an anti-Vietnam Struggle talking engagement in Canada—the primary on her North American tour—she hopped a flight to Cleveland. In her bag had been nutritional vitamins. Police seized her baggage on the airport and took her to jail on drug smuggling costs. “I informed them what [the vitamins] had been, however they mentioned they had been getting orders from the White Home,” the actress wrote in an essay titled “Mug Shot,” reflecting on the enduring picture of her with an unwavering gaze and raised fist taken greater than 54 years in the past now.
1970 was a giant yr for Fonda’s profession, police file, and, the way in which she tells it in her 2006 memoir My Life So Far, her hair: “It was my first hair epiphany.” Tonight, when Julia Louis-Dreyfus offered Fonda with the Display screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award on the 2025 SAG Awards, she referenced that hair epiphany, calling it the mug shot—and haircut—that began a magnificence motion.
Louis-Dreyfus was referring to the uneven full bang mendacity throughout Fonda’s brow, the hefty swaths of face-framing sideburns, and the piece-y line alongside the again of her neck that angled ahead in the direction of her collarbone all through the early ’70s. Fonda, a former mannequin and future aerobics guru who had lengthy adored her bombshell blonde lengths, recalled that the haircut got here at a second when she was prepared for a unique equation.
“Hair had dominated me for a few years,” she writes in her e-book. “The lads in my life appreciated it lengthy and blonde.” Now part-mullet, part-shag, her look was punk, brunette, slightly unhinged, and completely untamable—the type of haircut that would by no means be neatly tied up in a bouncy ponytail or piled into a night updo; the type of haircut that might by no means earn you a desk job. Fonda was in her mid-30s, entrenched in civil rights activism, and horrified by the atrocities of the Vietnam Struggle. “Maybe I used to cover behind [my hair],” she wrote. It was at that second, when realizing she had grow to be afraid of a lot greater issues than of being herself, she met hairstylist Paul McGregor and gave him a easy demand: “Do one thing.”
