"Go for the burn!" - Jane Fonda

JANE FONDA has played almost as many different parts off-screen as on, all of them with supreme success. As an eastern Establishment ingenue she was twice on the cover of Vogue and she achieved an appropriately airy demeanor in Barefoot in the Park. As the wife of French director and ladies' man Roger Vadim, and as the star of his film, Barbarella, she was the ultimate '60s sexpot. Then Jane got serious. She was nominated for an Academy Award in 1969, for They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, and she won the Oscar two years later for Klute. As a political activist and the wife of anti-Vietnam War protester Tom Hayden, she went to Hanoi to propagandize for the North Vietnamese; she even posed at the controls of a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun, for which she apologized during a Barbara Walters interview 16 years later.

Following in her father's impressive footsteps (and, luckily, not those of her mother, who cut her own throat when Jane was 12), she continued racking up Academy nominations for Best Actress — a total of six — and she won her second, for Coming Home. In the fitness-crazed '80s, this longtime bulimic was transformed: she marketed the best-selling exercise video in history. Jane Fonda's Workout pumped up her purse to such a degree that even footing the bill for Hayden's political campaigns couldn't burn it all up. In her latest, lucrative performance — as the wife of megamogul Ted Turner — Jane has been as convincing as ever.

Filmography: