Peter Fonda - # 215

Peter Fonda, Star of Easy Rider, Has Died at 79

He was number 215 on the list.

Actor Peter Fonda died Friday of lung cancer-related respiratory failure at the age of 79. His sister Jane Fonda wrote in a statement, “He was my sweet-hearted baby brother. The talker of the family. I have had beautiful alone time with him these last days. He went out laughing."

Peter had a more rebellious career than his father, Henry Fonda, whom the American Film Institute ranked among the 10 greatest American screen legends of the 20th century, or the Oscar-winning Jane, a controversial anti-war activist offscreen. His final film, The Last Full Measure, is scheduled to be released in the fall.

Peter Fonda rebelled against the Hollywood studio system by appearing in a B-movies produced and directed by Roger Corman that delved into the 1960s drug and biker culture. He roiled old Hollywood with Easy Rider, the phenomenally successful and game-changing 1969 road film about two drug dealers en route to Mardi Gras after a big score. “A man went looking for America, and couldn’t find it anywhere,” read the film’s iconic tagline. It was originally titled, The Loners.

In his four-star review of the film, Roger Ebert reported that the film confounded Henry Fonda. Studio executives must have felt the same. Produced for $360,000, it took in just over $19 million in rentals. It revitalized the career of Hollywood rebel Dennis Hopper, who directed, and made a star of Jack Nicholson, who earned his first Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Fonda received an Oscar nomination along with Hopper and Terry Southern for the film’s screenplay. It would be 30 years before Fonda was invited back to the Academy Awards.

Easy Rider not only identified an untapped youth market, but also blazed a trail for a new generation of idiosyncratic, film school-trained filmmakers, ushering in a period of personal filmmaking known as New Hollywood. In 1998, it was added to the Library of Congress National Film Registry’s archive of "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” films.

In the book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ‘N’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood, Peter Biskin, quotes studio executive Peter Guber, “After Easy Rider, everything seemed different. The executives were anxious, frightened because they didn’t have the answers anymore.”

In a tweet following his death, actress Illeana Douglas noted, “EASY RIDER depicted the rise of hippie culture, condemned the establishment, and celebrated freedom. Peter Fonda embodied those values and instilled them in a generation.”

Peter Fonda was born in New York on Feb. 23,1940. He was Henry Fonda’s only son. When he was 10, his socialite mother, Frances Ford Seymour, committed suicide. The facts of her death were kept hidden from Peter for years. His relationship with his father, whom he considered emotionally remote, was fraught. In his acclaimed 1998 memoir, Don’t Tell Dad, he wrote about how he ultimately confronted his father during a driving lesson about why he had not been told the truth about his mother’s death. His father’s response, “Keep your eyes on the road.”

The two reconciled just before his father died in 1982. “He said, ‘I love you very much, son,’” Fonda wrote in his memoir. “‘I want you to know that.’ I hugged him so hard, I could feel the pacemaker in his chest. Tears streaming down my own cheeks, I told him I loved him very much and kissed him on his lips. Something we had never done before.”

As an adolescent, Peter accidentally shot himself in the stomach. “I died three times on an operating table,” he said in a 2018 interview on Gilbert Gottfried’s Amazing Colossal Podcast. He discussed that childhood incident with the Beatles while taking L.S.D. “I know what it’s like to be dead,” he told John Lennon, which found its way into the song, “She Said She Said” on the Revolver album.

Fonda’s early career followed a traditional path. He appeared in regional theater and won a New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for his Broadway debut, a service comedy called “Blood, Sweat and Stanley Poole.” He appeared on such television series as “Naked City” and “Wagon Train.” He was in clean-cut leading man mode opposite Sandra Dee in Tammy and the Doctor (1963) followed by the more challenging Lilith (1964) opposite Jean Seberg and Warren Beatty.

But he became a counterculture figure working with prolific B-movie maven Corman on the biker film The Wild Angels (1966) and the drug film, The Trip (1967), whose script was written by future Easy Rider costar Nicholson.

He distanced himself from his earlier career. “My name’s Fonda, and it’s been Fonda for years,” Peter Fonda told Rolling Stone magazine in 1969. “And I won’t renounce Tammy and the Doctor. I call it Tammy and the Schmuckface, because it’s a bullshit movie, but it plays on the tube, and I don’t try to buy the negative back, and not have anybody see it.”

His 1971 debut as a director, the revisionist western The Hired Hand, has grown in critical estimation since its tepidly-received release. The chase film Dirty Mary Crazy Larry (1974) has also garnered a cult following. But Ulee’s Gold (1997) in which he portrayed a laconic beekeeper, earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Actor. He lost to Nicholson, who won for As Good as It Gets. In his acceptance speech, Nicholson said, “I’m honored to be on any list with…my old bike pal Fonda.”

His rejuvenated career got another boost from Steven Soderbergh’s gangster film The Limey (1999), another film which though a box office disappointment, has come to be regarded as underrated. When the film was released on home video, I interviewed Fonda, who revealed that in each movie he does, he sneaks in an homage to Nicholson. In The Limey, he said, it was in the scene in which he is grooming himself in the mirror while reflecting on the 1960s.

In a 2008 interview with the San Luis Obispo Tribune, Fonda explained his acting philosophy. “You don’t want to be an actor,” he said. “You want to act. I pointed this out to my daughter [Bridget Fonda] upon graduation when she said, ‘Dad, I want to be an actor.’ I looked at her. I said, “’Don’t you ever say that again. It’s a verb not a noun.’”