It was an inspired move to book Jane Fonda as guest speaker for the Women’s Institute annual conference this summer. The delegates who once slow-handclapped Tony Blair will be riveted to their seats by the tale that the Hollywood icon has to tell.

According to published extracts from Fonda’s forthcoming autobiography My Life So Far, she was forced into group sex by her first husband Roger Vadim, the French film director who encouraged her to find women to fulfil his fantasies.

“Sometimes there were three of us, sometimes more,” the 67-year-old star writes. “Sometimes it was even I who did the soliciting. So adept was I at burying my real feelings that I eventually had myself convinced I enjoyed it.”

The ladies of the WI will be curious to know what happened when Vadim, who directed Fonda in the sexy 1968 sci-fi spoof Barbarella, ordered a red-haired prostitute to join the couple.

After a lifetime of shameless grandstanding, Fonda is now posing as a psychologically aware feminist keen for women to learn from her experiences. This incarnation has irritated some American critics and provoked accusations that she has airbrushed inconvenient truths from her story.

Yet few can match her metamorphoses: going from America’s most reviled to most admired woman in a series of reinventions that cannily anticipated trends. Fonda morphed from sex kitten to serious actress to anti-war activist to fitness queen to symbol of the global feminist movement. Along the way she has won two Oscars, for Klute and Coming Home, and had three famous husbands: Vadim, Tom Hayden, the politician, and Ted Turner, the former CNN boss.

Vadim, the father of Fonda’s daughter Vanessa, is depicted in her book as a “cruel, misogynistic” man — although also “charming” and “lyrical” — who played on her insecurities. Surprisingly, this fiend of unbridled lust suffered from impotence at their first sexual encounter: “I remember thinking it was my fault and feeling humiliated.”

Vadim, who died in 2000, never forgot the experience, particularly since the condition lasted for three weeks. Later he blamed these failures on Fonda’s aggressive sexual behaviour. When they finally consummated the relationship they did not leave the room for 48 hours.

After four years of marriage, however, Fonda claims that Vadim’s scorn for “bourgeois” values made her agree to group sex. According to Christopher Andersen’s biography, Citizen Jane, Vadim began by sharing the lurid details of his adventures with his wife and then began bringing his lovers home.

Vadim claimed: “She seemed to understand and, as always, went all out — all the way.” Only later she told him that she felt degraded and demeaned, he maintained. Fonda’s current take is that she had become “disembodied from a lack of self worth”, neglecting her own “voice of desire and hearing only the man’s”. She was also anxious about being eclipsed by Vadim’s ex-wife, the sexpot Brigitte Bardot. “Every morning I was sure that Vadim would wake up and realise he had made a terrible mistake — ‘Oh my God! She’s not Bardot!’ ” She dates her emergence as “Hanoi Jane”, cheerleader of the anti-Vietnam war movement, to a day in 1968 when an American GI resister gave her a book that opened her eyes to the “betrayal” of Americans. However, the foundations of her distrust of the US government were laid four years earlier when she accompanied Vadim on a trip to his father’s birthplace in Russia. Surprised to find that the Russians were not “some alien, hostile people sitting over there just waiting to swallow up America”, she began to rail against “American propaganda”.

If Vadim was the second most important man in her life, the most influential was her father, the actor Henry Fonda. Most of his daughter’s ills, from her bulimia and low self- esteem to her attention seeking and choice of dominating husbands, have been ascribed to his emotional coldness and tragic marriage.

When she was born in New York on December 21, 1937, she was named after Jane Seymour, the third of Henry VIII’s six wives and an ancestor of her mother, the American socialite Frances Seymour Brokaw. Although the baby was nicknamed “Lady Jane” her parents were indifferent to her. Her mother, who had wanted a boy, put her in the charge of a governess and insisted that anybody coming in contact with the baby wore a surgical mask, so she spent her first year in a state of emotional deprivation.

After the birth of her brother Peter, Jane was aware that her father avoided her mother and began to display a frightening temper. She told her father’s biographer Howard Teichmann: “In those days his major emotion was rage. His rages were terrifying.”