Jane Fonda

Jane Fonda won the Academy Award for Best Actress twice in the 1970s, which on its own would make the decade hers. The first came for Klute in 1971, playing a call girl in a thriller that is really a character study. The second came for Coming Home in 1978, as the wife of a serviceman during the Vietnam War - a subject the American film industry had spent most of the decade avoiding.

Between and around those wins she was nominated repeatedly: Julia in 1977, The China Syndrome in 1979, On Golden Pond in 1981, The Morning After in 1986. And she was commercially reliable at the same time, which is a harder trick. Fun with Dick and Jane in 1977, California Suite in 1978, The Electric Horseman in 1979, and then 9 to 5 in 1980 kept her box-office standing intact through a period when the industry was reorganising around blockbusters.

Then she did something no film star had done. On 24 April 1982 she released Jane Fonda's Workout on videotape. It became the highest-selling VHS release of the twentieth century. She followed it with twenty-two more over the next thirteen years, and together they sold in excess of seventeen million copies.

It is worth sitting with what that actually meant. Home video in 1982 was a format looking for a reason to exist, largely stocked with films people had already seen. Fonda gave the machine a purpose that had nothing to do with cinema, and in doing so built the template for an entire home-fitness industry that is still running on her design.