In this week's issue of the New Yorker, the magazine profiles legendary actress Jane Fonda, who is clearly still on a comeback kick given a recently fawned over theatre turn, two movies in the can, and an upcoming book on aging coming out in the fall.

The profile — written by the magazine's theatre critic Hilton Als — delves deep into Fonda's "Third Age", exploring how she's redefined her life continually as actress, mother, political activist, fitness mogul, and now, author.

The "Queen Jane, Approximately" profile is unfortunately behind a paywall, but we were lucky to gain access and pull out the juiciest quotes from a profile that is well-worth the full long read.

On father Henry Fonda's emotional distance: "He hated people to cry," Jane said. "I was told when he was rehearsing 'Two for the Seesaw,' with Anne Bancroft, and she had a scene where she would get very emotional, he was so angry that she was actually crying and being emotional he stormed offstage and came back with a mirror and said, 'Look at yourself—it's disgusting.' That kind of vulnerability terrified him."

On her inability to admit she was ambitious, circa an early 1960s dinner with noted theatre critic Kenneth Tynan: "He asked me, 'What do you want to achieve?'" Fonda told me. "And I said, 'I want the audience to accept me.' And he laughed. That was, for him, a glimpse into the fact that I didn't feel like the person that he thought I was. I mean, what a lame answer!"

On how she dealt with the then-discrepancy between her acting and her anti-war activism: "...I became friends with Ken Cockrel, who was a black revolutionary lawyer. And he said, 'The revolution needs movie stars. That's a responsibility.' And that's when I started thinking about my career differently: it's about how I do the work, what I choose to do, and, hopefully, taking charge of what I do."

On the "Hanoi Jane" controversy: "I was Henry Fonda's daughter. I was privileged. I was Barbarella. They had my posters in their locker rooms. So I bretrayed class, I betrayed gender, and I betrayed, you know—you're a pinup girl, you're not supposed to speak. It would have been less pungent if I had been a man." She paused, before conceding that having allowed that photograph to be taken "was the biggest lapse of judgement in my life." She added, "I don't regret going to North Vietnam. I'm glad I went. I'm glad I did everything I did, except that."

On the end of her marriages to political activist Tom Hayden and media mogul Ted Turner: "I can look at Tom now, and Ted, and I can understand why I loved them, and also be totally amazed that I could spend as much time with them as I did. But I've always been in a relationship, and I have never been in a relationship where I could be myself."

On discovering christianity after her 2001 divorce from Ted Turner: "After we split up, I could feel myself falling into pieces," she told me. "I felt a calling. And then I made this discovery. I think it's in Matthew. Jesus is exhorting his disciples, saying to them, 'You must be perfect. You must be perfect.' But in Aramaic he was saying, 'You must be whole. You must be whole.''

On the first time she finally heard father Henry Fonda say that he was proud of her: "He did at the end," she said. "When I was in London promoting my book, I was on one of those shows, and the guy said, 'I'm going to play you something,' and he turned it on, and he had my father talking about me in 'Klute,' and saying how proud he was. He hadn't said it to me, so I heard it for the first time"—she paused, both laughing and crying—"while I was being interviewed on television."

On her return to acting in 2005's Monster-in-Law: "Oddly enough, that was when I started feeling free, Fonda told me. "It was like, Fuck it, man! And I think it was the ten years with Ted that gave me permission. I watched him and I saw how just letting it all hang out, if you really came from an authentic place—it was O.K. It was this stupid popcorn movie, but that was a liberating film for me." She said, laughing, "Maybe one of the best things about being married to Ted was that I got to play him in a movie!"

On how her acting has changed as she's gotten older: "Now it's more nuanced," she added. "Anger was always easy. Fear was harder. Nuanced emotions were harder."

On whether she misses her youth: "You couldn't pay me to be twenty again." 

Related: [BLOGS] No Airbrushing: Jane Fonda's 'Good Housekeeping' March 2011 Cover | [VIDEOS] Lisa Nova LOVES Jane Fonda

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