Jane Fonda Accepts Life Achievement Award at SAG Awards 2025

Jane Fonda is looking back on her life of achievement at the SAG Awards 2025. 

The actress-activist, 87, accepted the highest honor of the annual ceremony, the SAG Life Achievement Award, during the Kristen Bell-hosted show on Sunday, Feb. 23.

After a glowing introduction from presenter Julia Louis-Dreyfus and a montage of her work was played for he crowd, Fonda took the stage at Los Angeles’ Shrine Auditorium and Expo Hall, amid the crowd’s enthusiastic standing ovation.

“This means the world to me,” the two-time Oscar winner began her acceptance speech, before thanking SAG-AFTRA and telling the audience, “Your enthusiasm makes this seem less like a late-twilight-of-my-life [moment] and more like a, ‘Go girl, kick ass [one].’ ”

“Which is good, because I’m not done,” she added.

Following cheers from the crowd, Fonda went on to reflect on her “un-strategic” and “really weird career” over the past several decades, including retiring for 15 years and coming back at 65, calling herself “a late bloomer” in show business.

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She also said she’s “a big believer in unions,” explaining, “They have our backs. They bring us into community, and they give us power. Community means power, and this is really important right now when workers’ power is being attacked and community is being weakened.”

“But SAG-AFTRA is different than most other unions because us, the workers, we actors, we don’t manufacture anything tangible. What we create is empathy,” Fonda continued. “Our job is to understand another human being so profoundly that we can touch their souls. We know why they do what they do; we feel their joys and their pain.”

After giving examples of roles that tend to have complex backgrounds, like sex workers and bullies, Fonda said, “While you may hate the behavior of your character, you have to understand and empathize with the traumatized person you’re playing, right?”

“Make no mistake, empathy is not weak or ‘woke’ — and by the way, ‘woke’ just means you give a damn about other people,” she continued, as the audience cheered once more.

“Back to empathy: A whole lot of people are gonna be really hurt by what is happening; what is coming our way,” Fonda went on. “And even if they are of a different political persuasion, we need to call upon our empathy and not judge, but listen from our hearts, and welcome them into our tent. Because we are gonna need a big tent to resist successfully what’s coming at us.”

The actress recalled making her first film in 1958, during “the tail end of McCarthyism, when so many careers were destroyed.”

“Today, it’s helpful to remember, though, that Hollywood resisted. We did. Overseas, brave American producers like Hannah Weinstein hired blacklisted writers. Myrna Lloyd, John Huston and Billy Wilder founded the Committee for the First Amendment. They had a radio show on ABC Radio called Hollywood Fights Back. Members of the committee included every big-name actor in town.”

“Have any of you ever watched a documentary of one of the great social movements, like apartheid or our civil-rights movement or Stonewall, and asked yourself, would you have been brave enough to walk the bridge?” Fonda asked the crowd. “Would you have been able to take the hoses and the batons and the dogs? We don’t have to wonder anymore, because we are in our documentary moment. This is it, and it’s not a rehearsal. This is it, and we mustn’t for a moment kid ourselves about what’s happening. This is big-time serious folks, so let’s be brave.”

“We must not isolate. We must stay in community. We must help the vulnerable. We must find ways to project an inspiring vision of the future — one that is beckoning, welcoming, that will help people believe that, to quote the novelist Pearl Cleage, ‘On the other side of the conflagration, there will still be love. There will still be beauty, and there will be an ocean of truth for us to swim in.’ Let’s make it so,” she added, concluding of her award, “Thank you for this encouragement. Thank you.”

At the 31st SAG Awards honoring the best film and television performances of 2024 — with Wicked and Shōgun leading this year’s nominations list — Fonda is the 60th recipient of the Life Achievement honor. In recent years, it has gone to Barbra Streisand, Sally Field, Helen Mirren and Robert De Niro.

The award is dedicated to “a well-established performer who has contributed to improving the image of the acting profession and has a history of active involvement in humanitarian and public service endeavors,” per a press release.

SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher called Fonda “a trailblazer and an extraordinary talent” and “dynamic force who has shaped the landscape of entertainment, advocacy and culture with unwavering passion” in a statement last October.

“We honor Jane not only for her artistic brilliance but for the profound legacy of activism and empowerment she has created,” added Drescher. “Her fearless honesty has been an inspiration to me and many others in our industry.”

Among Fonda’s many other accolades are two Academy Awards, for 1971’s Klute and 1978’s Coming Home, two BAFTAs, an Emmy, seven Golden Globes and last year’s TIME Magazine Earth Award. The organization Women in Film created the annual Jane Fonda Humanitarian Award in 2021.

 See PEOPLE’s full coverage of the 31st annual Screen Actors Guild Awards, airing on Netflix.