Everybody loves Jane.
Jane Fonda obtained a standing ovation on the 2025 SAG Awards Sunday as she obtained onstage to simply accept the Life Achievement Award, which went to Barbra Streisand final yr.
Julia Louis-Dreyfus introduced the award to Fonda, 87, in entrance of the star-studded crowd on the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, after a montage performed that highlighted Fonda’s movie and TV profession.
“This means the world to me,” Fonda mentioned to the group. “Thank you SAG AFTRA. Your enthusiasm makes this seem less like a late twilight of my life, and more like a go girl, kick ass. Which is good because I’m not done.”
“I have had a really weird career. Totally unstrategic. I retired for 15 years and then I came back at 65 which is not usual, and then I made one of my most successful movies in my 80s. And probably in my 90s I’ll be doing my own stunts in an action movie.”
Fonda went on to name herself a “late bloomer” and mentioned that her SAG Award is “the flower show.”
“I love acting,” she continued. “We get to open people’s minds to new ideas and help them laugh when things are tough — like now. And for a woman like me who grew up in the 40s and 50s when women weren’t supposed to have opinions and get angry, acting gave me a chance to play angry women with opinions.”
Fonda additionally mentioned she’s “a big believer in unions” together with SAG-AFTRA. “What we create is empathy. Our job is to understand another human being so profoundly that we can touch their souls. We feel their joy.”
After Fonda’s speech awkwardly obtained interrupted by an announcer, she joked, “And I can conjure up voices!”
Fonda then spoke concerning the significance of displaying “empathy” to others. “We must not isolate. We must stay in community. We must find ways to project an inspiring message of the future. There will still be love. There will still be beauty. And there will be an ocean of truth for us to swim in.”
“Let’s make it so. Thank you for this encouragement,” she concluded.
The Life Achievement Award is the very best honor that SAG-AFTRA provides to its members. The newest recipients embody Streisand, Sally Subject, Helen Mirren, Robert De Niro, Alan Alda and Morgan Freeman.
“I am deeply honored and humbled to be this year’s recipient of the SAG Life Achievement Award,” Fonda mentioned in an announcement after she was introduced because the 2025 recipient.
“SAG-AFTRA works tirelessly to protect the working actor and to ensure that union members are being treated equitably in all areas, and I am proud to be a member as we continue to work to protect generations of performers to come,” she added.
Fonda, the daughter of famed actor Henry Fonda and socialite Frances Ford Seymour, made her movie debut within the 1960 comedy “Tall Story.”
She went on to star in films like “Fun with Dick and Jane,” “9 to 5,” Julia” and “The Morning After,” after which took a 15-year performing break earlier than returning with “Monster-in-Law” in 2005.
She gained the Greatest Actress Oscars for “Klute” in 1972 and “Coming Home” in 1979.
Her TV work consists of the ABC drama “The Dollmaker,” which gained her an Emmy in 1984, and the hit Netflix comedy “Grace and Frankie,” additionally starring Lily Tomlin.
Fonda has been a vocal advocate for social causes for the reason that Sixties, advocating for antiwar actions, gender equality, civil rights and local weather change.
In an interview with Selection earlier than the SAGs, Fonda known as herself a “quintessential late bloomer” in life, and mentioned she’s spent the previous 20 years attending to know herself in new methods.
“It’s recent that I am starting to let that into my psyche and it makes me very happy because you don’t always know what kind of impact you have,” she mentioned.
“I have just always felt that I wasn’t good enough. That has made the difference — that I was never satisfied, that I always wanted to get better,” she went on. “I know why I made the mistakes I did, and I know what was in my heart. And so I really worked at it, and I’m proud of myself that I didn’t settle.”
