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“Did you ever dream about a place you never really recall being to before?” he asks her. “A place that maybe only exists in your imagination? Some place far away, half remembered when you wake up? When you were there, though, you knew the language. You knew your way around. That was the sixties.” He pauses, then adds, “No. It wasn't that either. It was just '66 and early '67. That's all there was.” Terry is introduced in an audacious montage, practically a self-contained trailer for the character, that includes shots of him smiling and mugging for the camera, scored to “King Midas in Reverse,” emphasizing the slippery charm of a character who brags that his secret in life is “I learned how to skate as a young boy.” There’s a shot in the montage of an American Express billboard which, in context, is using Terry Valentine’s face to sell credit cards, but the actual billboard is of Peter Fonda. You have to really know yourself to allow a touch that self-deprecating. 

Along with motorcycles and the counterculture, one of the defining threads in Fonda’s career and life was his rebellion against authority generally, father figures specifically, and his own dad, a beloved American star whose legacy he would keep grappling with. The book jacket for Peter Fonda’s 1998 memoir combines the two rather bluntly: it’s titled Don’t Tell Dad and features a back jacket photo of a grinning Peter Fonda astride Captain America in “Easy Rider.” 

The Fonda-directed star vehicle “Wanda Nevada” (1979), about a drifter who wins a 13-year old girl (Brooke Shields) in a card game, tries hard not to be sleazy, but its “Paper Moon” affectations never convince. It's mainly interesting for its behind-the-scenes story of reconciliation. Fonda paid his father $1000 to play a small role in the film, after the elder Fonda confessed that nobody was offering him work. It was the only time the two acted together onscreen. 

The Fonda family seemed to put away most of its remaining differences when the elder Fonda starred opposite Katharine Hepburn in the multiple Oscar-nominated “On Golden Pond” (1981), costarring and produced by Jane Fonda. The film was a surprise blockbuster, for a movie built around two senior citizens bickering in a lakeside house. Jane Fonda accepted her father’s only Best Actor Oscar on his behalf because he was too ill to attend the ceremony; he died of heart disease five months later.

Arguably Fonda’s deepest and most surprising performance is as the title character of “Ulee’s Gold,” a film he agreed to make three years shy of his sixtieth birthday. Fonda’s Ulee Jackson is a taciturn beekeeper who, like Fonda’s own father, is left to care for children (and later, grandchildren) in the void left by absent mothers (Ulee’s wife is dead, and the mother of his grandchildren has run off, leaving him to care for two girls on his own). Written and directed by independent filmmaker Victor Nunez, who made a star of Ashley Judd with “Ruby in Paradise,” the movie gets bogged down in a crime thriller plot (Ulee’s son is in jail for armed robbery, and his two accomplices want the loot). But the image of a man demonstrating love for others through his actions, despite being an undemonstrative person himself, resonates with Fonda’s own stories of how he and his sister used to figuratively beat their heads against the stone wall of their father’s coldness. From this pain came decades of art. 

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