He followed that with another Corman opus, The Trip (1967), a paean to LSD that was written by Nicholson and featured Hopper playing a freaked-out character. He then latched on with Roger Corman’s low-budget enterprise and starred as biker Heavenly Blues in The Wild Angels (1966). He followed up with The Victors (1963) and Lilith (1964), in which he played a suicidal mental patient. Groomed to be the next Dean Jones, Fonda made his film debut opposite Sandra Dee in Tammy and the Doctor (1963). “New Yorkers don’t know what the people who live in Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska and Colorado know: the reality of this world, what it is made of, the reality of days, nights, weather, season, dirt, air, food, love.” It gave him the chance to leave Manhattan, which he loathed. He was signed to a personal contract with producer Ross Hunter to produce and to act. It was an auspicious turn: He received the Daniel Blum and the New York Drama Critics Award as the most promising young actor of 1961. He enrolled at the University of Omaha but quit school during his third year and became an apprentice at the Cecilwood Theatre in Fishkill, New York.Īfter a year in New York, Fonda made his Broadway debut, playing an Army private in Blood, Sweat and Stanley Poole. Subsequently, Peter was sent to live with relatives in Nebraska. His father remarried Susan Blanchard, the stepdaughter of Oscar Hammerstein II, but she left him after five years of marriage. Throughout his adult life, he openly referred to an uneasy relationship with his dad, who died in August 1982. In 1950, his mother, Frances, committed suicide on her 42nd birthday Jane and Peter were told she died of a heart attack. When at home, he and Jane spent most of their time with their maternal grandmother.
As a child, he attended a number of boarding schools in the Northeast. Peter Fonda was born in New York City on Feb. “Most people can’t hang in with me,” he said in a 1997 interview. In the years before Ulee’s Gold, he had become a cinematic recluse, living in Livingston, where he had two ranches and 300 acres and rejoiced in the solitude. Rebecca convinced Fonda to move to Livingston, Mont., where they settled into a community at times populated by Jeff Bridges, Sam Peckinpah and other artistic off-roaders. McGuane went on to marry actress Margot Kidder, who also was in the movie. He also starred in Thomas McGuane’s 92 in the Shade (1975), where he met Portia Rebecca Crockett then the wife of the writer-director, she divorced him that year and quickly married Fonda. His other acting stints were uneven, from the lowbrow The Cannonball Run (1981) to a German impressionistic film, Peppermint Freiden (1983).
#Peter fonda easy rider movie#
In the early ’80s, Fonda appeared in a humdrum batch of projects: He played as charismatic cult leader in Split Image (1982), a freewheeling adventurer in Dance of the Dwarfs (1983) and a suicidal father in the 1985 NBC movie A Reason to Live. “I was writing during that period, and I got about as much writing done as a child in a sandbox,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1984. He directed and starred opposite Brooke Shields in Wanda Nevada (1979), which featured a cameo by his father.įor a period after Easy Rider, Fonda lived on an 82-foot sailboat, essentially having dropped out. He then helmed Idaho Transfer (1973), a message film about the environment. Nearly 30 years after Easy Rider, Fonda’s performance in Ulee’s Gold (1997) as a beekeeper and sullen Vietnam War veteran whose family had nearly fallen apart earned him a best actor Oscar nom.įonda followed up Easy Rider by starring and directing The Hired Hand (1971), a feminist Western that his Pando Company made for Universal. With his cool shades, leather jacket with the flag stitched on back, he sat perched atop a chrome-laden, high-handle-bar cycle, and the poster for the film was ubiquitous in college dorms in 1969 and the early ’70s.Īs a symbol for rebellious youth, Fonda, along with Mick Jagger, Jimi Hendrix, Muhammad Ali and John Lennon, were among the most revered of countercultural poster boys. To a generation of young people, Fonda was “Captain America” and a poster-boy for the age. It won a standing ovation at Cannes and the festival’s best director award. For the cataclysmic year of 1969, Easy Rider was a road movie that accomplished cinematically what Jack Kerouac’s On the Road did for literature.
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