Home Women Bridget Fonda :

A year later, she did a sexy dance with a Confederate flag in "Shag" which caught the eye of writer-director David Hare, who cast her as Blair Brown's flighty younger sister in "Strapless" (1989). By then she had already gained widespread attention in "Scandal" (released two months earlier in 1989), playing Mandy Rice-Davies, one of the young women involved in the notorious English government-sex scandal of the 1960s.

Fonda was born in Los Angeles, California, into a family of actors, including her grandfather Henry Fonda, father Peter Fonda, and aunt Jane Fonda. Her mother, Susan Jane Brewer, is an artist. She is named after Margaret Sullavan's daughter Bridget Hayward, with whom her father was in love at one time. Her parents divorced and he re-married to Portia Rebecca Crockett (ex wife of author Thomas McGuane). Peter and Portia brought up Fonda and her brother Justin, and older stepbrother Thomas McGuane Jr (b circa 1962) in the Coldwater Canyon section of Los Angeles. 

She attended Westlake School for Girls in Los Angeles. During this time, Bridget and Justin had little contact with their father or any of the Fonda family, recalling in an interview: "When I was a kid, the most important thing for me was my home... People would come and go, and things would change, but that place wouldn't. I loved it. I want to have that for the rest of my life. I want to have a place".

She first became involved with the theatre when she was cast in a school production of Harvey. She refused to solicit acting tips and advice from her famous relatives, and studied method acting at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute.

She made her film debut as an extra in the 1969 movie Easy Rider as a child in the hippie commune that Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper visit on their trek across the United States. Her second film role was also a non-speaking role in the 1982 comedy Partners. It was not until 1988 that she had her first speaking role in a feature film starring with John Hurt in Scandal, based on the Profumo affair. That year, she also appeared in both You Can't Hurry Love and Shag. The roommate-from-hell thriller "Single White Female" (1992) paired Fonda with another young star, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and she contributed some nice work to the ensemble acting of the twentysomething comedy "Singles" (1992), as the character planning to have her breasts enlarged. 

Given the chance to carry a film, she starred as a fairly credible (if whining) assassin in "Point of No Return" (1993), the American remake of Luc Besson's "La Femme Nikita" (1990), but the movie did not make her a superstar as some had hoped. Fonda put down the gun to play an appealing mother in "Little Buddha" (1993), an aspiring musician in "Camilla" (1994) and a down-to-earth waitress who shares a winning lottery ticket with Nicolas Cage in the Capraesque fable, "It Could Happen To You" (1994). She also essayed the female lead in Harold Becker's "City Hall" (1996), a drama about politics and corruption in Manhattan, co-starring Al Pacino (as the mayor) and John Cusack (as a deputy mayor).

Her first big role in a movie was when she starred as an attractive journalist in The Godfather, Part III. After gaining additional work experience on a few theater productions and small movie roles, she was cast in the lead for Barbet Schroeder's Single White Female. A review in the New Yorker proclaimed she had "...a provocative, taunting assertiveness" and Rolling Stone said that Fonda was "a comic delight". Though she was the top-billed female in Sam Raimi's "A Simple Plan" (1998), the director's first departure from genre fare to concentrate on character development gave her nowhere near as much to sink her teeth as it did Bill Paxton and particularly Billy Bob Thornton. That said, she acquitted herself admirably as the sensible and loving new mom who nevertheless has the chilly heart of Lady Macbeth. 

She delivered a memorably sexy turn in "Finding Graceland" (1998), dressed in full regalia as a Marilyn Monroe impersonator. "Lake Placid" (1999), a drama penned by David E Kelley, offered her a juicy part as a paleontologist investigating a mysterious death while "The Break Up" (aired on Cinemax in 1999) cast her as a hearing-impaired woman accused of murdering her abusive husband. While still chasing that illusive star-making role, Fonda must remain content with being an actress who works constantly, which isn't so bad, after all. Fonda was also offered the role of Ally McBeal before Calista Flockhart, but turned it down to focus on her film career.

On November 29, 2003, she married film composer and former Oingo Boingo frontman Danny Elfman (who composed The Simpsons theme song).They have one son, Oliver, born in January 2005. She has not appeared in a film since her marriage.