Photo: CALL HER DADDY/Instagram
Jane Fondafeels lucky to be alive.
During an appearance onCall Her DaddyWednesday, the film icon says she struggled with an eating disorder in her twenties.
Just as her career was beginning, she said, she began suffering from bulimia.
“I led a secret life. I was very, very unhappy. I assumed I wouldn’t live past 30,” Fonda said, joking that she doesn’t “understand” how she’s now 85.
She detailed the “secret life” she led that consisted of not going out, not dating, and being “unhappy” overall. “And then I was also making movies that I didn’t very much like,” she said, referring to the romantic comedies she starred in at the start of her career, likeTall Story(1960) andSunday in New York(1963).
“It seems so innocent in the beginning,” Fonda said of her experience with the eating disorder. “What you don’t realize is, it becomes a terrible addiction that takes over your life.”
The80 for Bradystar said that it harmed her appearance, making her look tired, and also impeded her ability to have an “authentic relationship.”
She said that she connects her struggle with disordered eating to feeling inauthentic during that period of her life. “It happens when your life is inauthentic — when what you should be doing and who you should be, or who you really are, those things are being betrayed.”
Vivien Killilea/Getty for Palm Springs International Film Society
While it began in her twenties, she told host Alex Cooper, it lasted for two decades. She got to a point in her forties, she said, where she thought, “‘If I keep on like this, I’m gonna die.'”
Despite being married — at the time, to political activist Tom Hayden — and being a mother, she wasn’t sure she would survive. “My life was important,” she said. “But I was becoming less and less able to continue it.”
“I didn’t realize that there were groups that you could join — I didn’t know anything about that yet. And nobody talked about it. I didn’t even know there was a word for it. And so I just went cold turkey, and it was really hard.”
Never miss a story — sign up forPEOPLE’s free daily newsletterto stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from juicy celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.
At the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, the actress said she “took the easy road for a while” with roles she now considers to be less than flattering, withBarbarellaamong them.
“I would say [feeling inauthentic] ended with Barbarella,” she said, perHuffPost. “I liked doing something that caused a certain generation of men to have their first erections. But then I became an activist.”
The film, which “could have been a truly feminist movie,” Fonda said, is now being remade, withSydney Sweeney set to star and produce. She said shetries not to think about the remake. “Because I worry about what it’s going to be,” she toldThe Hollywood Reporter.
source: people.com
