Bridget Fonda

Bridget Fonda

Bridget was named for Bridget Hayward, a woman her father had loved and who had committed suicide. At the age of five, Bridget traveledwith her father during the filming of Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider [1969], the metaphorical film, about motorcycle-riding hippie-outlaws searching for personal freedom, that made Peter Fonda, who costarred with Hopper and Jack Nicholson, an icon of the counterculture. Aside from that experience, of which Bridget has remembered little more than "goats, and a lot of dirt," she rarely saw her father, whose work frequently kept him on location for long periods of time.

After her parents' divorce, in 1972, Bridget and her brother, Justin, were reared by their mother in the Coldwater Canyon section of Los Angeles, where they had little contact with their father or any of the Fondas. "When I was a kid, the most important thing for me was my home," Bridget Fonda recalled in an interview with Jessica Seigel of the Chicago Tribune [April 25, 1993]. "People would come and go, and things would change, but that place wouldn't. I loved it. I want to have that for the rest of my life. I want to have a place."

When her mother moved to Montana to live with her boyfriend, Bridget was compelled to shuttle between her mother's home and her father's. In her interview with Jeffrey Wells, Fonda admitted that she bore the emotional scars of what she called her "abandonment thing," but she has scrupulously refrained from criticizing her father. "I really get along with him well," she explained when she spoke to Wells. Noting in an interview with Michael Segell for Cosmopolitan [August 1989] that she had had no need to defy her freedom-loving parents in a self-detrimental manner, she explained, "I've just always gone in my own direction and done things in my own way for my own reasons. That's a healthy way of rebelling, because you don't destroy yourself."

While she was still a student, at the exclusive Westlake School for Girls, in Los Angeles, Fonda was cast as Nurse Kelly in a production of the comedy Harvey, an experience that prompted her to seek a career as an actress despite, rather than as a natural consequence of, her background. "My life struggle is going to be trying to establish myself within my family," she told James Kaplan of Rolling Stone [April 20,1989]. "I mean, this is like we have a little tiny cottage-and two skyscrapers. And who's gonna get the sun? It's something that, just by deciding that I wanted to be an actress, I set myself up for." Some of her teachers cautioned her not to expect any special treatment, but Fonda perceived such overcompensation for her family legacy as just another form of being treated differently from her classmates.

Fonda also resented the implication that acting was in her blood. Not only had she refused to solicit acting tips and advice from her famous relatives, she had worked hard to learn her craft, studying Method acting at New York University's celebrated Lee Strasberg Theatre institute for four years. For the first two years, she suffered from stage fright and self-consciousness that were exacerbated by the extra scrutiny she was under because of her name. "When you've got all eyes on you, people saying, 'She's not so hot,' you sort of wish you were a nobody," she told a reporter for People [Spring 1990]. But in her third year she learned to subordinate her concern for others' opinions to her desire to do what she thought was best for any given assignment. "Once I was able to make myself look like a fool, I was no longer scared," she told Michael Segell.

Fonda made her screen debut as one of the lovers in Franc Roddam's seven-and-a-half-minute segment of the multi-director experimental opera anthology Aria [1987], in which she and her partner engage in passionate sex to the accompaniment of the "Liebestod," from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, in a Las Vegas hotel room before slashing their wrists. In 1988 she appeared in a production of Just Horrible that was mounted by the Manhattan Class Company; played Sissy in Class 1 Acts at the Nat Horne Theatre in New York City; and was featured in A Confession, at the Warren Robertson Workshop, and in Pastels, at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute. She had her first speaking part in a mainstream movie in Richard Martini's forgettable You Can't Hurry Love [1988], in which she took the role of Peggy Kellogg, a likable woman who works for a dating agency and introduces a naive young man from Ohio to the outrageous anomalies of life in contemporary Los Angeles.

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