8/3/2023 0 Comments Peter fonda easy rider![]() ![]() His love of bikes (“riding them gives me focus”) got him inducted into the AMA Motorcycle Hall of Fame. It’s a wry irony that he lost the gold to his Easy Rider pal Jack Nicholson for As Good As It Gets, bringing his career around to the film that made them both stars.įonda never held a grudge against Easy Rider for cementing his image in the public mind. Fonda remembers the “glow” he felt when he received an Oscar nomination as Best Actor. In this internalized, character-driven gem, the then–58-year-old gave the best and most moving performance of his career. At the Sundance Film Festival where Ulee’s Gold debuted, Fonda admitted he felt his father inhabiting the stoic everyman hero. What Jackson can’t do is open up emotionally (shades of Henry). That all changed in 1997, when Fonda scored a major career comeback with Ulee’s Gold, a low-budget indie from director Victor Nuñez in which he plays Florida beekeeper Ulysses “Ulee” Jackson, a widower and Vietnam vet raising two troubled granddaughters. But he was losing career momentum, stifled by films that went straight to video or oblivion. Through the next decades, Peter danced through various genres: action ( The Cannonball Run), horror ( Spasms), drama ( Bodies, Rest & Motion, alongside his daughter Bridget Fonda) and a role in the TV series In the Heat of the Night. Maui Boogie: Starring Peter Fonda and the Seven Sacred Poolsįonda scored a hit with the 1974 outlaws-on-the-run romp Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry and in 1979 stirred controversy by directing Wanda Nevada, in which his character romanced a 13-year-old Brooke Shields - it’s also the only film in which Peter and Henry ever appeared together. Fonda was forming friendships and a daring style that hinted at a new energy surging under old Hollywood tropes. The next year, Fonda starred in Corman’s The Trip, with a script by Nicholson, about the hallucinatory LSD subculture that also found its way into Easy Rider. His eulogy at a funeral service particularly stands out. Seen today, you can still feel its raw, primitive energy and feel the sensitivity and nuance that Peter brought to a role that hardly demanded it. Critics did not do cartwheels, but the film was a hit. ![]() Henry wasn’t exactly beaming when his son took the leading role in 1966 The Wild Angels, a Corman quickie that riffed on the bike culture of the Hell’s Angels with Fonda as a biker called Heavenly Blues. It was his friendship with B-movie king Roger Corman, however, that changed the course of Peter’s career. Peter hated his early movies, playing pretty-boy nothings in Tammy and the Bachelor (1963) and The Young Lovers (1964). Peter partied, drugged, wrangled with cops and hung with the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, even the Beatles John Lennon quoted his words “I know what it’s like to be dead” in the song “She Said, She Said,” referring to Peter’s story about accidentally shooting himself in the stomach when he was a kid. I wish he could open his eyes and dig me”). “I was an asshole,” Fonda said bluntly, “rebelling, acting out.” Though he reconciled with his father before Henry’s death in 1982, they were never close (“I dig my father. Talking to Fonda in the late 1990s, he refused to wallow in self pity about his early years. Jane and I never went to a funeral or service for her I didn’t know where she was buried.” Understandable, perhaps, but not to Peter, who wrote in his 1998 memoir, Don’t Tell Dad: “After that, no one ever talked about Mom. And when his mother, who had mental issues, slit her throat at mental institution, Henry lied to Peter, 10, and Jane, 12, and told them she had a heart attack. As the son of Henry Fonda and younger brother of Jane Fonda, Peter was Hollywood royalty. In person, the smooth-faced, handsome Fonda radiated the no-sweat confidence of a man who had it easy. In fact, he created quality work before and well after he went searching for America and couldn’t find it anywhere. For Fonda, one of the unintended consequences of the wildfire success of Easy Rider, also noted for a bright, shiny breakthrough performance from Jack Nicholson as a boozing ACLU lawyer befriended by the bikers, was to reduce this member of a showbiz dynasty to a one-trick pony. Fonda and Hopper, who died in 2010, fought like badgers for the rest of their lives about who deserved credit for the film the former produced and the latter directed (they both were Oscar-nominated for the screenplay they wrote with Terry Southern). ![]()
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