Bridget Fonda: Funny Face

https://lebeauleblog.com/2019/09/11/bridget-fonda-funny-face/

Bridget Fonda is a very important figure around here. She has been one of the most popular subjects of the What the Hell Happened series. That’s because for a brief time in the nineties, Fonda was everywhere. Her status as a movie star seemed pre-ordained. But that crucial star-making role never materialized and one day, Fonda walked away from her career.

In this cover story from the Novemeber 1993 issue of Movieline magazine, you can see some hints of things to come. Fonda comes across as grounded, but uncertain.

When Bridget Fonda decided to come to my house to do this interview I wondered how we’d manage, since the house is currently being remodeled and the only sanctuary is my study, which is so crowded I felt it wouldn’t be comfortable for a movie star. But her publicist said Bridget was cool, so I got some cookies, figs, cinnamon and peppermint chips, and placed them within arm’s reach of the chair she’d be sitting in. When she arrived, she ignored the goodies I had set out and asked for an ashtray. For the next five and a half hours, smoke was all she needed.

“Please don’t write about this,” she pleaded after her third cigarette. “My grandmother doesn’t like that I do it.”

Neither did my dog, but I didn’t say that. Instead, I asked her why she does it.

“Off the record?”

“No, on.”

“I smoke when I’m nervous,” she said. “I get nervous about not being a good interview.”

Just like her grandfather, who said that he never liked doing interviews because he didn’t have the words. But the truth was, Henry was a good subject–he was honest, he didn’t bullshit, and he could be brutal about himself and his family. I told Bridget this and she said she never got to know Henry as an actor, though she feels she relates more to him professionally than she does to her father Peter or her aunt Jane.

Bridget grew up a Fonda from a distance. After her parents split up when she was eight, she and her younger brother lived with her mother in L.A. Her father lived in Hawaii for a while, then moved to Florida, and finally to a ranch in Montana with his second wife. Bridget got along with her new stepmother better than she did the agent/movie producer her mother remarried. Bridget went to Westlake School for Girls, which she says she despised. During the only school play she appeared in, Harvey–which her grandfather’s pal Jimmy Stewart had immortalized on film–she got an inkling of her future. “I was terrible in it,” Fonda recalls, “but one day in rehearsals I was just fucking around and that’s when I suddenly knew that I wanted to do this.”

After graduating Bridget went to New York, attended NYU and studied drama at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute. In 1986 she auditioned for–and got–a part in the Franc Roddam section of the film Aria. The role had no words and called for her to be nude, but Fonda never blinked or balked. And just like that, she was noticed.

In 1988 she appeared in You Can’t Hurry Love and Shag, where she did a sexy dance which was later noticed by David Hare, who cast her in Strapless. She played Christine Keeler’s party friend in Scandal, and Mary Shelley in Roger Corman’s Frankenstein Unbound, then went to Italy to play a photo-journalist in The Godfather, Part III. Her boyfriend at the time, British actor/screenwriter Lee Drysdale, directed her in Leather Jackets, which went straight to video. In 1991 came Doc Hollywood and Iron Maze, a film that “never came off on-screen the way I had hoped it would.” Then, in ’92, came two films which brought her some attention: Singles and Single White Female. This year she’s been in Point of No Return, a remake of the French-Italian film La Femme Nikita, and Bodies, Rest & Motion, with her boyfriend Eric Stoltz. Two other films will be out soon: Bernardo Bertolucci’s Little Buddha and Camilla with Jessica Tandy. She is currently working on Cop Gives Waitress $2 Million Tip with Nicolas Cage and Rosie Perez.

At 29, Bridget Fonda seems to be a very in-demand actress on the verge of finding that breakthrough film that will help define her the way Klute did her aunt Jane, and Easy Rider did her father Peter. But she has already left no doubt that the Fonda genes have now passed to the third generation. Grandpa Henry would be proud.

LAWRENCE GROBEL: Did you ever wish you had a different last name?

BRIDGET FONDA: No, though I wonder what kind of satisfaction I would have with where I am now if I wasn’t part of a family that has done such phenomenal work. I wonder what it would feel like to know that you’ve made it completely under your own steam. I sometimes wonder if I would be more at peace if I could know I made it by myself, instead of always wondering how many times my name got me in the door.

Q: But, once in the door, you’ve still got to get cast–and no one’s casting Jane or Henry or Peter when you’re there.