Jane Fonda Adds to Anti-War Resume

(CANVAS STAFF REPORTS) - In a case of art imitating life, two-time Academy-Award winning actress Jane Fonda is returning to her roots, playing an aging Woodstock hippie in an upcoming film.

Shooting of the multigenerational indie film, “Peace, Love, Misunderstanding,” began this month in New York's Hudson River Valley, with an eye toward a 2011 opening.

According to The Hollywood Reporter , the film centers on a conservative, neurotic New York City lawyer who, after her husband leaves her, takes her son and daughter to the Woodstock house of their estranged, hippie grandmother, Fonda.

The role could resonate with Fonda, an outspoken anti-war activist who vehemently protested U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.

Fonda was dubbed “Hanoi Jane” when she visited Hanoi in 1972 and was photographed surrounded by North Vietnamese soldiers while sitting on an anti-aircraft gun.

The same year, she spoke out against the Vietnam War and President Nixon at a rally near the Republican National Convention in Miami Beach, Florida.

When cases of torture began to emerge among POWs returning to the United States, Fonda called the returning POWs "military careerists and professional killers" who are "trying to make themselves look self-righteous, but they are war criminals according to the law.”

In 1988, Fonda  apologized for her "Hanoi Jane" photograph.

“I will go to my grave regretting the photograph of me in an anti-aircraft gun, which looks like I was trying to shoot at American planes,” Fonda said in an interview with Barbara Walters. “It hurt so many soldiers. It galvanized such hostility. It was the most horrible thing I could possibly have done. It was just thoughtless.”

Fonda stayed away from anti-war protests for more than 30 years until 2007, when she participated in an ant-Iraq War rally held on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., declaring that "silence is no longer an option.”