Rise to Fame
Playing Barbarella in a skintight silver suit for her first husband's camera wasn't where her career was supposed to go. The pivot came with Klute in 1971, where she spent months interviewing sex workers to prepare for a role Hollywood assumed she'd be decorative in. She won the Oscar. Then Coming Home added a second in 1978. On Golden Pond she engineered herself, buying the film rights so her emotionally remote father could have one last great role. He won. She lost. That probably felt right to both of them.
In the Spotlight
At 88, she's running political organizations, not doing retirement press tours. The non-Hodgkin lymphoma diagnosis in 2022 went into remission, which she handled by pointing out she had health insurance while most people don't. The SAG Life Achievement Award landed in February 2025. Then she relaunched her father's McCarthy-era Committee for the First Amendment with 3,000+ entertainment industry members joining within months. Her father signed on to fight McCarthyism in 1947 when it first formed. She rebuilt it for the same reason.
Side Notes
The workout empire wasn't a side hustle. From 1982 to 1995, she sold 17 million workout video copies across 22 tapes, building a fitness business reportedly valued at $100 million, and funneled the profits into the Campaign for Economic Democracy, a political action committee she co-founded with husband Tom Hayden. She had bulimia through most of it, purging up to 20 times a day until her mid-thirties. The leotard-and-legwarmers image was one thing. The ambition underneath it was another.