Before she retired in 2002, the actor Bridget Fonda had perfected the art of inscrutable decision-making. She picked projects as if she were in a pinball machine: a romcom here, a psycho-thriller there. “Do you want to star in a colonic irrigation comedy with Sir Anthony Hopkins?” she was (more or less) asked in the early Nineties. She’d say yes, then find herself on the set of a forgotten debacle called The Road to Wellville. It was just another inscrutable detour in a career defined by its indefinability.
Fonda – the granddaughter of Henry, daughter of Peter and niece of Jane – turns 60 on Saturday. It’s been 22 years since she last acted. But many of her movies hold up, markers of a time in filmmaking that valued sex and romance, ideas and provocation. She was a ribald Mandy Rice-Davies in the Profumo affair movie Scandal (1989), and a Minnesotan Lady Macbeth in Sam Raimi’s A Simple Plan (1998). In Cameron Crowe’s Seattle grunge tapestry Singles (1992), she dreamt of love, body modification and rock stars. She had such an enviable haircut in the lurid B-movie Single White Female (1992) that her loopy new roommate Jennifer Jason Leigh swiped it, then her boyfriend, and then everything else. In 1997’s Jackie Brown, Quentin Tarantino cast her as a scheming, perma-stoned surfer girl, all bikinis and toe rings.
Fonda appeared in almost too many films for someone only in the public eye for 15 or so years. Some are well remembered (that’s her as Andy Garcia’s photojournalist fling in 1990’s The Godfather Part III, for instance). Others are cult curios: that farcical crocodile movie Lake Placid (1999); Point of No Return (1993), the ill-fated US remake of La Femme Nikita; Henry Sellick’s doomed animated/live-action hybrid Monkeybone (2001). A few only sound made-up. Rough Magic? A supernatural romcom from 1995 in which Russell Crowe tails her to New Mexico before she’s given mystical powers by a legendary shaman? Surely not! What I’m saying is that Fonda had an intriguing, quietly brilliant acting career for a while. Then, in the blink of an eye, it stopped.
Here’s what we know. In 2002, Fonda starred in a made-for-TV film adaptation of The Snow Queen. In early 2003, she signed up for a recurring role on the legal drama series The Practice. Weeks before filming was due to begin, she was driving down the Pacific Coast Highway when her car lost control, flipped over an embankment and tumbled downhill. She emerged – “miraculously”, according to a Page Six article from the time – with mere cuts and bruises. Her role was recast in The Practice, then a few months later married her boyfriend, composer Danny Elfman, had a baby in 2005, and made her last official public appearance in 2009, at the premiere of Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. That’s, believe it or not, the entirety of it. Pestered by a paparazzo at a Los Angeles airport last year and asked if she’d ever return to acting, Fonda replied politely yet firmly: “I don’t think so – it’s too nice being a civilian.”
