Actors - Henry Fonda

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	Actors - Henry Fonda

Henry Jaynes Fonda (May 16, 1905 – August 12, 1982) was a highly acclaimed American film, stage, and television actor, best known for his roles as plain-speaking idealists. Fonda's subtle, naturalistic acting style preceded by many years the popularization of method acting. He was the patriarch of a family of famous actors, including son Peter Fonda, daughter Jane Fonda, granddaughter Bridget Fonda, and grandson Troy Garity.

Fonda was born to William Brace Fonda and Herberta Jaynes. From his humble upbringing in a Nebraskan Christian Scientist family, Fonda made his mark early as a Broadway actor, and made his Hollywood debut in 1935. Fonda's career gained momentum after his Academy Award-nominated performance in 1940's The Grapes of Wrath
, an adaptation of John Steinbeck's novel about an Oklahoma family who moved west during the Dust Bowl. Throughout six decades in Hollywood, Fonda cultivated a versatile career and a concrete screen image in such classics as The Ox-Bow Incident
, Mister Roberts
, and 12 Angry Men
.

Later in his life, Fonda moved both toward more challenging and lighter roles in such epics as Once Upon a Time in the West
and family comedies like Yours, Mine and Ours. He earned a Tony nomination for his role in 1974's Clarence Darrow (having previously won a Tony in Mister Roberts
in 1948), and finished his career with a critically-acclaimed performance in On Golden Pond
in 1981, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor. Fonda was also honored with "Lifetime Achievement" Academy Awards, Golden Globes, and Tony Awards. He died in 1982, leaving behind a legacy of classic performances, many of which are considered the finest examples of the "Golden Age of Hollywood."

Life and career

Family history and early life

He was born in Grand Island, Nebraska to William Brace Fonda and Herberta Krueger Jaynes, observant Christian Scientists. The Fonda family had emigrated westward from New York in the 1800s, and can trace its ancestry from Genoa, Italy, to The Netherlands in the 1500s, and then to the United States of America in the 1600s, where they founded a still-extant town called Fonda, New York. In Henry Fonda's autobiography, he wrote,

"Early records show the family ensconced in northern Italy in the sixteenth century where they fought on the side of the Reformation, fled to Holland, intermarried with Dutch burghers' daughters, picked up the first names of the Low Countries, but retained the Italianate Fonda. Before Pieter Stuyvesant surrendered Nieuw Amsterdam to the English the Fondas, instead of settling in Manhattan, canoed up the Hudson River to the Indian village of Caughawaga. Within a few generations, the Mohawks and the Iroquois were butchered or fled and the town became known to mapmakers as Fonda, New York."

As a youth in Nebraska, Fonda was active in the Boy Scouts of America as a youth and was a Scoutmaster, but was not an Eagle Scout as some report. He then attended the University of Minnesota, majoring in journalism, although he did not graduate. At age twenty, he started his acting career at the Omaha Community Playhouse when his mother's friend Dodie Brando, mother of Marlon Brando, needed a young man to play the lead in You and I. He went East to perform with the Provincetown Players and Joshua Logan's University Players, an intercollegiate summer stock company and incubator of rising stars, where he worked with Margaret Sullavan, his future wife, and began a lifelong friendship with Jimmy Stewart.

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Actors - Henry Fonda

Life and career

Family history and early life

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