Welcome to Unstyled. I'm your host, Christine Barberick, co-founder and global editor-in-chief of Refinery 29.

Each week, I invite a notable person to come in and talk with us as we explore the funny, inspiring,

sometimes heartbreaking tales of life, work, and love, as told through the things that we wear.

In the process of drafting this introduction, my team and I have all been ruminating over who Jane Fonda is.

But maybe, after so much research and prep, the real question might better be, who isn't Jane Fonda?

She's been Henry's daughter, Barbarella, Cloutes Brie Daniels, Hanoi Jane, and Mrs. Vadim, Aidan, and Turner.

She's been an actor, a radical, a writer, a mother, an Oscar winner, and a visionary fitness guru. And now, as Fonda glides freely into her eighth decade, with a mega hit of a TV show, and even more protest arrests under her belt,

the answer to that unanswerable riddle could be this.

Jane Fonda is an icon.

Though she was born to Hollywood royalty as the daughter of Henry Fonda and

Canadian socialite Francis Brocah, her childhood wasn't so starry. And if you've watched 2019's

mesmerizing HBO documentary, Jane Fonda in five acts, inspired by her 2005 memoir, you would

know how profoundly those early years have shaped her.

At 12, Fonda's mother died by suicide while undergoing inpatient psychiatric treatment.

And later that same year, Henry, already, as she tells it, and emotionally withholding parent,

remarried a woman 23 years as junior.

On the precipice of adulthood, Fonda began modeling,

a career path that triggered a decades-long struggle with bulimia. At 21, she connected with

legendary acting coach Lee Strasberg in his class, where he deemed she had real talent,

and her life, as we know it, took form. Her breakout role was in 1965's Cat Ballou,

and a few years after that she starred in Sydney Pollock's 1969 classic,

they shoot horses, don't they?

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