Bridget Fonda at 60: the Nineties great who vanished without a trace
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 – 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 (1989), and a Minnesotan Lady Macbeth in Sam Raimi’s (1998). In Cameron Crowe’s Seattle grunge tapestry (1992), she dreamt of love, body modification and rock stars. She had such an enviable (1992) that her loopy new roommate Jennifer Jason Leigh swiped it, then her boyfriend, and then everything else. In 1997’s , cast her as a scheming, perma-stoned surfer girl, all bikinis and toe rings.
