Jane Fonda has opened up about her mother’s suicide when she was just 12 years old, and how she feels about getting older.
The 80-year-old actor and model spoke candidly in an interview with People ahead of a new HBO documentary about her, Jane Fonda in Five Acts.
Fonda’s mother Frances Ford Seymour suffered from bipolar disorder and committed suicide when her daughter was just 12 years old in 1950.
Fonda’s father Henry, however, told her and her brother Peter that their mother had died of a heart attack. It wasn’t until they later read about the death in a magazine that the siblings learned the truth.
The screen legend says she dedicated her 2005 memoir My Life So Far to her mother to force her to “try to figure [her mother] out,” rather than “try to sweep her under the rug.”
“I never really knew her,” she added.
Fonda says that she ultimately learned that the suicide wasn’t her fault.
“It certainly had a big impact but it’s not just the actual act of suicide, it’s everything that led up to it because if you have a parent who is not capable of showing up, not capable of reflecting you back through eyes of love, it has a big impact on your sense of self.
“As a child you always think it was your fault because a child can’t blame the adult, they depend upon adults for survival so it takes a long time to get over the guilt.”
The movie star also spoke about how she has become more confident in herself as she’s aged, revealing that up until her 60s she was “to an extent defined by the men in my life.”
Fonda, who has been married and divorced three times, has previously spoken about how she would “turn herself into a pretzel” to be what her partners wanted her to be - something which began with her father.
Now that she’s stopped dating, however, Fonda says she has finally become “who I was supposed to be all along.”
Jane Fonda in Five Acts premieres on HBO September 24.
