Jane Fonda thinks she’s only starting to "live up to" her potential.
The 80-year-old actress lacked confidence when she was younger and felt she needed the support of her father, Henry Fonda, and her three ex-husbands, Roger Vadim, Tom Hayden and Ted Turner, but she’s proud to have been a "late bloomer" who has finally come into her own.
She said: "I didn’t have very much confidence, I didn’t take myself seriously, and I thought that if I was with those kinds of men that I could be somebody.
"They were all so brilliant, and I thought they could teach me things and take me farther than I had ever gone.
"I think I’m maybe just starting now to live up to my potential. I’m a late bloomer, but you know, we live 34 years longer than we used to, so it’s not so bad being a late bloomer."
The ‘Grace and Frankie’ actress believes her protests against the Vietnam War marked a turning point in her life as it gave her a sense of purpose.
She told the Daily Telegraph newspaper: "Prior to my becoming an anti-war activist, I had lived an eventful life, an interesting life, but a meaningless life. I was a pretty girl who made movies and was kind of hedonistic.
"And when I decided to throw in my lot with the anti-war movement, everything shifted. The way I looked at the world the people I was drawn to, what interested me – everything changed."
But Jane thinks she would have been "woke" much sooner if she had grown up in the current political climate.
She said: "It took me until my mid-thirties to get woke. But I think if I’d been 20 and Trump had been elected, I would have been woke earlier."
The ‘Book Club’ actress’ life is explored in a new HBO documentary, ‘Jane Fonda in Five Acts’ and she hopes it will "encourage" people to be more politically active.
She said: "I hope it will encourage people to become active. There’s a gangster running the country, and we need an honest, right-thinking non-gangster to lead. And it’s going to take every single person in this country to make that happen."
Jane Fonda is a late bloomer
