Profile: Jane Fonda

That advice is unlikely to be heeded by the most famous, and flexible, pensioner in America. This week, the Queen of Work-Out DVDs, 72-year-old Jane Fonda, slipped on her leotard, pulled her leg-warmers up over her arthritic knees and turned up the pop music. The actress, who in 1982 fronted one of the first and most successful fitness videos ever, selling 17 million copies worldwide, is to launch a new version aimed at baby boomers who will be encouraged, like generations of Fonda's fans before them, to "feel the burn".

She is a good advertisement for her product. With wide sparkling eyes, a wrinkle-free brow and impossibly perky bosoms, she looks fantastic. At the age of 68, she became the face of L'Oreal. There's nothing remarkable about a Hollywood icon having a little work done. But Fonda is unusual in owning up to it. "I owe 30 per cent (of my looks] to genes, 30 per cent to good sex, 30 per cent is because of sports and a healthy lifestyle, and for the remaining 10 per cent I have to thank my plastic surgeon," she said in 2009.

The only thing about her body that the actress and fitness queen becomes a little touchy about are her creaky knees, which some have suggested might have been brought on by those vigorous fitness workouts in the 1980s. Not at all, she insists: osteoarthritis runs in the family.

So does talent. Her father Henry Fonda was Hollywood royalty, the anguished liberal everyman who loaned his stellar screen presence to movies from 12 Angry Men to The Grapes Of Wrath. Her brother Peter Fonda played a disillusioned outsider in Easy Rider and went on to carve out a distinguished film career himself, while actress niece Bridget Fonda is best known for her role in Single White Female. But though there was no shortage of ability in the Fonda family, it was also a lonely, dysfunctional place to grow up.

Jane Fonda's mother, the socialite Frances Ford Seymour, committed suicide by cutting her own throat. The young Jane wasn't told at the time and had to learn the truth many years later from a newspaper article about her father. Henry Fonda was an emotionally unavailable parent, wrapped up in his own career and love affairs. The young Jane began a career as a fashion model, twice making the cover of Vogue, and moved to Paris. When she returned to New York she studied under the method-acting guru Lee Strasberg. Movies like Barefoot In The Park followed.

But it was the French director Roger Vadim, her first husband, who made Fonda a household name with the zero-gravity striptease which began the interstellar sex flick Barbarella. Fonda's 2005 autobiography revealed that the sexual experimentation wasn't reserved for on screen: the two invited other women to share their bed. The marriage to Vadim produced a daughter but ended in divorce.

It was followed by marriage to the political activist Tom Hayden, and her strengthening political views provoked the most notorious incident of Jane Fonda's life. To travel to Hanoi at the height of the Vietnam War was inevitably going to be inflammatory. But when she flew to Vietnam in July 1972 she also gave a series of interviews criticising the US and allowed herself to be photographed sitting on a Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun which was being used to shoot at American planes. The notorious images were used as propaganda by the Communist authorities and almost ended her career. In 1988 she told interviewer Barbara Walters: "It was the most horrible thing I could possibly have done. It was just thoughtless." To this day, "Hanoi Jane" is still a figure of hate amongst hardline US conservatives and some Vietnam vets.

In 1982, after making hard-hitting films such as The China Syndrome, Fonda made a film which touched America and brought her closer to her father, with whom she had always had a difficult relationship. On Golden Pond, the moving story of a reconciliation between an adult daughter and a dying father, roles played by Jane and Henry Fonda respectively, was widely seen as autobiographical. It won Henry Fonda his only Oscar, which his daughter accepted on his behalf.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Fonda's leotard and legging-clad body was beamed into homes across the world as she made 22 workout videos.

Cindy Crawford, Barbara Windsor and Davina McCall followed suit, releasing their own fitness DVDs. But despite her sweaty imitators, Fonda remains the queen of the home workout. And with her fitness empire worth an estimated $600 million she has shed the pounds and gained the dollars.

Having gone from one of the most hated women in America to one of the most loved in little more than a decade, Fonda sealed the deal by marrying Ted Turner, the billionaire owner of CNN, the TV success story of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Turner was a driven workaholic, who described his ambitions to be "the world's greatest sailor, businessman and lover, all at the same time". During her marriage to Turner, she relocated to Atlanta and devoted herself to charity work, founding and running a charity devoted to preventing teenage pregnancy. In 2001 she attended a showing of Eve Ensler's Vagina Monologues and, with Ensler, founded V-Day, a movement to combat violence against women and girls which has taken her to the Middle East, Africa and Central America.

It lasted longer than her marriage to Turner, which ended in 2001. But now Fonda is rumoured to be contemplating marriage again, this time to music producer Richard Perry, a mere five years her junior.

In 1991 she announced her retirement from acting but seems unable to resist a curtain call. She starred in 2005's Monster-in-Law with Jennifer Lopez, and two years later with Lindsay Lohan and Felicity Huffman in Georgia Rule. Diehard fans probably wish she'd stuck to her original plan.

It's been quite a journey, from sultry interstellar sex kitten to radical revolutionary to the woman who is regularly voted among the women that Americans love most today. But as Jane Fonda again dons her sweatbands and crunches her way to another million, this youthful flat-bellied grandmother could be forgiven for looking back on her extraordinary career with pride.

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Of her new workout DVD, Fonda said: "It will target an audience that has been left out: my age group and the boomers. I want to get to people who have stopped working out, or never did. I can't wait."

In the 2004 US presidential election, Democrat candidate John Kerry was described as a "Jane Fonda Democrat". A doctored photograph appeared to show the pair sharing the stage at an anti-Vietnam War rally.

&149 She notoriously supported the radical black activists the Black Panthers in a speech which declared: "Revolution is an act of love; we are the children of revolution, born to be rebels. It runs in our blood."

In 2005, Fonda planned to go on an anti-war bus tour with George Galloway, left. Only the arrival of Hurricane Katrina put paid to the plan

Fonda was chosen as one of People Magazine's annual 100 Most Beautiful People in the World, in May 2007.

Her first exercise video, Workout With Jane Fonda, is still the best-selling workout video of all time.