Jane Fonda Battled the Flu When She Won Her First Oscar: ‘I Went in a Corner Backstage and Cried’

The night Jane Fonda won her first Oscar was memorable, but not for the reasons you might expect.

In 1972, the actress, then in her 30s, took the stage to accept the Academy Award for Best Actress for her role as a wayward call girl in Stupid. But what many considered one of Fonda’s happiest nights was anything but.

On stage, the political activist – who has been controversially vocal about the ongoing war in Vietnam – kept her speech short. “There’s a lot to say and I won’t say it tonight,” she said simply.

There was a lot going on that night behind the scenes. “I had the flu – I was really sick. I had a fever of 102. I remember thanking the people who voted for me and saying exactly what my father told me to say,” she tells author Dave Karger in her new book 50 nights of the Oscars (on sale January 23). “And then I left the stage, went to a corner backstage and cried.”

Jane, now 86, grew up in the world of film – her father, Henry Fonda, who died in 1982, was also a famous actor. But in 1972, her father didn’t win any Oscars. On the night of her triumph, she didn’t know what to feel.

“I cried with relief, because I said what I had to say, I got off the stage, and nobody booed,” she says. “But I also cried because my dad never won an Oscar, and it just felt wrong.”

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A decade later, Henry would receive an honorary Oscar in 1981 and the award for best actor for On the Golden Pond in 1982.

Jane says her illness, combined with a looming sense of regret, sent her home the night after Stupid to win. She tells Karger that she skipped the famous after parties and “collapsed in bed” instead.

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At the time, she was in a relationship with the late political activist Tom Hayden, whom she married in 1973.

And while Jane Fonda won her second Oscar in 1979 for Coming home, the trophies were put away. “When I was married to Tom Hayden, I wanted to play down the Hollywood part of me, so I didn’t have [the Oscars] exposed anywhere,” explains Fonda in 50 nights of the Oscars.

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In the following years, she won a number of Golden Globes, which she added to her collection. By the time she and Hayden divorced in 1990, she had collected several additional accolades for her work.

“Then I married Ted Turner, and his office was wall-to-wall trophies,” she says. “I thought, ‘He can display every damn one of his trophies — why the hell can’t I?’ ”

In 2000, the actress parted ways with the founder of CNN. “Now I have them displayed on a bookshelf in my living room,” she says, where visitors can touch the golden statuettes themselves.

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The Grace and Frankie star, who underwent chemotherapy for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2022 and is now in remission, says that despite her many ups and downs in life, she has always found a way to move forward.

“Life gets better with age,” she told PEOPLE in her 2023 cover story. “There have been tragedies and hard things in my life. But I’ve never succumbed to them. I’ve been resilient all my life.”

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