Jane Fonda draped her knockout figure in a white trouser suit Saturday to pick up a prize named after her friend Harry Belafonte at the Tribeca Film Festival.
The 85-year-old, whose activism during the Vietnam War left her with the nickname ‘Hanoi Jane,’ glowed as she hit the red carpet.
Alicia Keys presented her with the Harry Belafonte Voices For Social Justice Award that evening and Robin Roberts interviewed her onstage.
In a dazzling star-studded group shot, Jane, Robin and Alicia all gathered together on the red carpet and treated the camera to their winning smiles.
Harry, who died in April aged 96, had a glittering singing career but also commanded international attention as an activist, throwing himself behind such causes as civil rights in America and the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa.
Aglow: Jane Fonda draped her knockout figure in a white trouser suit Saturday to pick up a prize named after her friend Harry Belafonte at the Tribeca Film Festival
Looking fab: Alicia Keys (left) presented her with the Harry Belafonte Voices For Social Justice Award that evening and Robin Roberts interviewed her onstage
‘It’s up to us’: Jane’s onstage remarks heavily involved climate change, which has become a particular cause célèbre of hers
Icon: Harry, who died in April aged 96, had a glittering singing career but also commanded international attention as an activist
While accepting her prize that night, Jane made a joke about Rupert Murdoch’s son James, who acquired Tribeca Enterprises in 2019.
‘Let’s hear it for Tribeca Film Festival. For giving chances to women and to people of color in the film industry and to young people,’ she said according to Deadline. ‘I’m so grateful to the Tribeca. I can’t believe that a Murdoch owns it.’
She added: ‘Harry devoted himself to the civil rights movement and whenever they needed something – if they needed something, he would be sure to get it for them. He used his platform in the way that celebrities should.’
Jane’s onstage remarks heavily involved climate change, which has become a particular cause célèbre of hers, to the point she racked up multiple headline-grabbing arrests while protesting in Washington, DC in recent years.
‘Those of us who are alive right now in this decade, it’s up to us (to make a change) because when we go it’ll be too late,’ she said Saturday.
‘We’re the ones who can make the difference. Let’s not, when history is written, be the ones that were staying at home and rearranging the china.’
While speaking to Robin, Jane declared she was giving up acting until the next US presidential election in order to focus on getting ‘rid of the Joe Manchins’ and backing politicians more in line with her climate agenda.
‘We need to try to light a fire under Biden and look, we have to vote for him, ok? We have got to get really mad at him and we have to try to demand that he earn our votes. But I mean, let’s be real because the alternative is the end of everything.’
Trio: In a dazzling star-studded group shot, Jane, Robin and Alicia all gathered together on the red carpet and treated the camera to their winning smiles
Dynamic duo: Jane and Alicia were snapped linking arms on the red carpet, beaming as the shutterbugs snapped away at the pair of them
The day’s festivities also included a cocktail event where Jane could be glimpsed hobnobbing with Harry’s widow Pamela Belafonte, who had been wife number three.
As an antiwar activist in 1972, Jane was infamously snapped in Hanoi sitting on a North Vietnamese antiaircraft gun used against Americans.
That photo earned her lifelong notoriety as ‘Hanoi Jane,’ and she has been protested by veterans ever since, though some ex-military have also supported her.
During her 1972 trip to enemy territory, she also participated in propaganda broadcasts from the North Vietnamese Army’s station Radio Hanoi.
While speaking on Radio Hanoi she intimated that U.S. servicemen should disobey their orders – though she claimed on 60 Minutes decades later that she was merely ‘asking them to consider it.’
After returning to the United States, she said in an 1973 interview quoted by the New York Times that the torture of American prisoners of war was ‘understandable.’
She told KNBC-TV: ‘These men were bombing and strafing and napalming the country. If a prisoner tried to escape, it is quite understandable that he would probably be beaten and tortured.’
Jane’s only son Troy was named after Viet Cong bomber Nguyễn Văn Trỗi, who attempted to assassinate U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara.
Glam: Alicia bared her enviably sculpted midriff in an olive green ensemble, while Robin played up her trim frame in a charcoal trouser suit
Duo: The day’s festivities also included a cocktail event where Jane could be glimpsed hobnobbing with Harry’s widow Pamela Belafonte, who had been wife number three
In the 2018 documentary Jane Fonda In Five Acts she reflected on how her drug use and disordered eating influenced her political activities during the Vietnam War.
‘I was alternately bulimic and anorexic. I would maybe eat one soft-boiled egg and spinach a day, period. I took Dexedrine, which is speed,’ she said.
‘So I was really speedy, and I was starving, along with like getting all of this new information coming in at a very rapid pace,’ Jane explained.
‘I mean, I’m high-strung anyway, but me on Dexedrine without eating, and feeling like I have to say everything all at once, it’s like – I’m amazed that anybody could receive what I was saying. It was like: “Wow! Who is this woman?”‘
