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In the 1940 “The Grapes of Wrath” it is said her daddy Henry Fonda pretty mush invented method acting (the total immersion in all aspects into the personality of the character played—what killed Heath Ledger (who played one too many perverts),and made Marlon Brando and Johnny Depp successful if sick superstars) and actually thus became a socialist to play a socialist part.
The pro-progressive fantasy of Fonda's Tom Joad made for a stellar performance but unfortunately set the stage for the red diaper waste of liberal byproducts Jane and Peter Fonda—cool for the Hippies and their brief irrelevant era yet a harmful delaying waste of time to the advance of America,

I suppose that explains something. Fonda, a card carrying liberal, was Mr. US Navy in tinsel town. His only rival was John Ford who was a rel Rear Admiral. Fonda first crossed paths with the Navy in “Mr. Roberts and his portrayal of the hard working self effacing thoroughly decent regular officer dealing with a nut case USNR CO is classic. Fonda got introduced to agroup of mid level officers at San Diego to study up on the character he was to play. He thought the officers were great and he really liked the sort of low key but emotionally reserved personality type that seemed to predominate in the surface officer fraternity. Latter he played a Nimitz like figure in “In Harms Way” and spent time hanging out with a number of
retired flag officers before filming to soak up their ethos. He was
introduced to Chester Nimitz and thought he was about the greatest man in the world. In fact in the last years of Nimitz life Henry Fonda was far loser to the five star admiral than he ever was to any of his children. Again it was the low key, technically competent, but very reserved personality Fonda strongly identified with. The Navy officer corps thought so highly of Fonda's presentation of the regular navy officer that the USN bestowed a special award on him at a gala at the Kennedy Center in the early 1980’s, I think.

Having been an actor at one time, I came to the understanding that an actor is asked to be, in effect, a multiple schizophrenic, hopping from one false identity to another, with his success or failure depending on how well he can do just that.How can anyone ever be sure of his own identity, or develop a strong one, if his “job” is to pretend he doesn’t exist as an individual , except as a vehicle for some other identity or persona someone else has written for him? One of the best of them, Peter Sellers, used to claim rightfully that he didn’t like interviews, and didn’t come off well in them, because he was really a
“boring person”. Brando always
had an outsider’s stance toward Hollywood
, really resented that he had to appear in potboilers occasionally to finance his other ambitions, which were usually quixotic and simplistic, like his committment to Native American causes.Everybody’s familiar with the details of how his personal life descended into a sorry heap of tragedy, with multiple divorces, wayward children who died young, etc.
Yet there are a number of Hollywood actors who because of strength of character and innate goodness and normality (which always shone through in every character they played) managed to stay above all the mess their Industry makes possible.
Chief among them, and a perennial example of the virtues of
being normal, and holding on to being normal, is the best of them all, Jimmy Stewart.