The year was 1970. Jane Fonda had just finished filming the crime thriller Klute. On her way home from an anti-Vietnam War speaking engagement in Canada—the first on her North American tour—she hopped a flight to Cleveland. In her bag were vitamins. Police seized her luggage at the airport and took her to prison on drug smuggling charges. “I told them what [the vitamins] were, but they said they were getting orders from the White House,” the actress wrote in an essay titled “Mug Shot,” reflecting on the iconic image of her with an unwavering gaze and raised fist taken more than 54 years ago now.
1970 was a big year for Fonda’s career, police file, and, the way she tells it in her 2006 memoir My Life So Far, her hair: “It was my first hair epiphany.” Tonight, when Julia Louis-Dreyfus presented Fonda with the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award at the 2025 SAG Awards, she referenced that hair epiphany, calling it the mug shot—and haircut—that started a beauty movement.
Louis-Dreyfus was referring to the choppy full bang lying across Fonda’s forehead, the hefty swaths of face-framing sideburns, and the piece-y line along the back of her neck that angled forward towards her collarbone throughout the early ’70s. Fonda, a former model and future aerobics guru who had long adored her bombshell blonde lengths, recalled that the haircut came at a moment when she was ready for a different equation.
“Hair had ruled me for many years,” she writes in her book. “The men in my life liked it long and blonde.” Now part-mullet, part-shag, her look was punk, brunette, a little unhinged, and entirely untamable—the kind of haircut that could never be neatly tied up in a bouncy ponytail or piled into an evening updo; the kind of haircut that would never earn you a desk job. Fonda was in her mid-30s, entrenched in civil rights activism, and horrified by the atrocities of the Vietnam War. “Perhaps I used to hide behind [my hair],” she wrote. It was at that moment, when realizing she had become afraid of much bigger things than of being herself, she met hairstylist Paul McGregor and gave him a simple demand: “Do something.”
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