Frances Ford Seymour

Frances Ford Seymour Fonda was a Canadian-American socialite. She was the second wife of actor Henry Fonda and the mother of actors Jane Fonda and Peter Fonda.

Biography

Born in Brockville, Ontario, Canada, Seymour was the daughter of Sophie Mildred and Eugene Ford Seymour. When she was 14 in 1922, she moved with her family to Fairhaven, Massachusetts and graduated from a public high school there. According to her daughter Jane, who gained access to records from a psychiatric hospital with help from lawyers, Seymour was a victim of recurrent child incestuous abuse in Ontario and eventually had nine abortions.
On 10 January 1931, she married George Tuttle Brokaw, a millionaire lawyer and sportsman. They had one daughter, Frances de Villers "Pan" Brokaw.
A year after Brokaw died, Seymour married actor Henry Fonda on 16 September 1936, at Christ Church, New York City. She had met Fonda at Denham Film Studios in England on the set of the film Wings of the Morning. The couple had two children, actress Jane and actor Peter, but their marriage was troubled. According to Peter Fonda, these difficulties later gave him empathy for the marital problems of actor Dennis Hopper, his co-star in the 1969 film Easy Rider. Hopper's then-wife Brooke Hayward is the daughter of Margaret Sullavan, Henry Fonda's first wife.
Frances, who had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, died by suicide while she was a patient at the Craig House Sanitarium in Beacon, New York. Her suicide came three and a half months after Fonda asked her for a divorce. She is buried in Ogdensburg Cemetery, Ogdensburg, New York.