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"Instead of drifting along like a leaf in a river, understand who you are and how you come across to people and what kind of an impact you have on the people around you and the community around you and the world, so that when you go out, you can feel you have made a positive difference." Making a difference in the world is very important to Jane Fonda, and it always has been. Throughout her career she has been a fitness guru, a fashion model, a writer, an actress, and much, much more. Through it all, from her first Broadway play to where she is as she moves into later stages of her life, she's remained true to herself.

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Fonda was educated at Vassar, and has been active from 1954 through to the present day. The 1960s were where she began her stardom, with Sunday in New York (1963), Barefoot in the Park (1967), and other films. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, she won two Oscars for Best Actress and a Primetime Emmy award. She also released her first workout video in 1982, and it was widely purchased. She has won an Academy Award seven times, and has been nominated for other awards, as well. Over thirteen years, Fonda released twenty-two workout videos that sold more than seventeen million copies.

Learning From Mistakes in the Early Years

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Fonda was born in New York City, to a father who was an actor and a mother who was a socialite. On her mother's side of the family she is distantly related to the third wife of Henry VIII, Jane Seymour. She has one brother and a maternal half-sister. Her mother passed away in 1950, when Fonda was just 12 years old. Fonda's father remarried that year. Fonda began teaching dance at the age of 15 at Fire Island Pines, New York. She also attended Greenwich Academy in Connecticut. She also attended Vassar College, and Emma Willard School. Before acting, she was a model.

She has said, "You don't learn from successes; you don't learn from awards; you don't learn from celebrity; you only learn from wounds and scars and mistakes and failures. And that's the truth." While she has made mistakes and experienced failures, she has also learned from those issues and used them to develop stronger values and better ways of coping with the challenges of life, In short, she has truly applied what she states in her quote, because she used any mistakes or problems as a learning experience from which she could grow and develop the talents she already possessed.

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After rising to fame in the 1960s, Fonda experienced a strong resurgence of her career in the 1970s despite becoming an outspoken activist. At times there were concerns that her activism might affect whether she was given movie roles, but this did not seem to affect what fans and casting agents thought of her ability to play a role. She continued to get work, and her career remained strong. One of the biggest factors for Fonda during that time was that she was willing to upset and even alienate audiences, as opposed to working to win them over to what she believed or felt. The strategy worked extremely well for her.

Activism, Writing, and Charity Work

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"As I started getting older, I realized, 'I'm so happy!' I didn't expect this! I wasn't happy when I was young.," she said as she moved away from as many acting roles and into other types of work that she felt were just as important -- if not more important -- than the acting roles she had played. Fonda retired from film in 1991, but she returned to the big screen in Monster-in-Law (2005). She also returned to Broadway in 2009, but that didn't stop her from writing, working with charities, and continuing with the activism that had made her both famous and infamous throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

Fonda was openly opposed to the war in Vietnam, supported the Civil Rights Movement, and was generally outspoken about the things that mattered to her throughout her long career and into her retirement. She also became an outspoken voice for feminism, and has worked to educate women on their health and encourage them to speak out when they are mistreated. Her autobiography, My Life So Far, was released in 2005. She also published another book in 2011, with stories and information from her lives and from the lives of others who contributed.

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She has been divorced three times and has battled cancer in her later years, but was successfully treated for the disease. She has remained outspoken about women's rights and health issues, and has been anti-war, as well. She was atheist in her earlier years and turned to a version of Christianity as she got older. No matter what Fonda has involved herself in, she has always seemed focused on the value she could bring to the cause. Whether it was writing, acting, or helping others, she has been dedicated to anything in which she involves herself. Fans haven't seen the last of her.