Cinema: A Palpable, Homespun Integrity

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One also sensed that his lifelong workaholic tendencies were a way of keeping his talent not just in shape but growing, so that his final, Academy Award-winning appearance in On Golden Pond turned out to be something few old actors manage: a triumphant valedictory rather than a sad farewell tour of remembered glories. One sensed there, as elsewhere, that this paradoxically shy man worked earnestly, without visible egotism, and often with a hint of steeliness grounded in his conservative Nebraska background, to turn his private turmoils to metaphorical account in his roles. How else account for all the character portrayals that turned out so well—victim (The Wrong Man) and coward (Welcome to Hard Times), stiff neck (Fort Apache) and klutz (The Lady Eve), blackguard (Once Upon a Time in the West) and sly egotist (My Name Is Nobody), raw presidential timber (Young Mr. Lincoln) and polished (The Best Man).

He tended to dismiss the growing recognition that he had quietly become one of the great actors of his generation, perhaps of the past half-century. "I know people use words like 'national treasure' and such when they talk about me," he said. "I don't pay any attention to that. It's embarrassing." He always preferred to confine " craft discussion to simple and simplifying definitions ("I don't believe one studies acting—one feels it, knows it, plays it") and to almost homiletic, determinedly unsubjective observations " about what he did ("Make the audience believe they are not seeing an actor working, but a real person with feelings and hurts").

Believe we did, with increasing affection as the years wore on. Maybe, after all, there was an actor's epitaph in part of Tom Joad's speech. "Maybe a fella ain't got a soul of his own, but on'y a piece of a big soul—the one big soul that belongs to ever'body. . ." By the time he died last week, at 77, after a typically gallant, and underplayed, fight against heart disease that had confined him almost completely to his bedroom for a year, Henry Fonda had personified hundreds of pieces of that one big soul and in the process had become rather a large part of it himself.

— By Richard Schickel