Jane Fonda on her mother’s suicide: ‘It takes a long time to get over the guilt’

Jane Fonda has opened up about the “big impact” her mother’s suicide had on her at the age of 12.
The 80-year-old actress travels back to her childhood in new HBO documentary Jane Fonda in Five Acts, which hits screens on 24 September (18), and recounts the effect her mother Frances Ford Seymour Brokaw’s bipolar disorder had on her as a child.
While she has since come to accept and understand her mother’s behaviour, Jane is still haunted by the events of 1950, which saw her mother tragically take her own life at a psychiatric institution in Massachusetts months after being admitted.
“If you have a parent who is not capable of showing up, not capable of reflecting you back through eyes of love, it has a big impact on your sense of self,” the Grace and Frankie star told People. “As a child, you always think it was your fault… because the child can’t blame the adult, because they depend on the adult for survival. It takes a long time to get over the guilt.”
Canadian-born socialite Frances married Jane’s father, famed film actor Henry Fonda, in 1936, with the couple going on to welcome Jane and her brother Peter before divorcing in 1949.
After Frances’ suicide at the age of 42, Henry told his children their mother had died from a heart attack and the actress only discovered the truth by reading about it in a movie magazine. It was a revelation that kick-started a yearning to learn more about her mother, which she first channelled in her 2005 memoir My Life So Far. She later uncovered more about her mother’s battle with mental health by stumbling across old medical records, which Jane believes has helped her better understand her childhood trauma.
“When you go through that kind of research… if you can come to answers, which I was able to do, you end up being able to say, ‘It had nothing to do with me,'” she explained. “It wasn’t that I wasn’t lovable. They had issues. And the minute you know that, you can feel tremendous empathy for them. And you can forgive.”