Although cast in a similar mold to his contemporaries Gary Cooper and James Stewart, Henry Fonda was one of the most distinctive American screen actors. Tall, dark, good-looking, and quietly spoken, he exuded decency, sincerity, and understated authority, and spent much of his 46-year career being offered up as a repository of honesty, a quiet American hero and man of the people. He will forever be remembered as the incarnation of the president in Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), Steinbeck's Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath (1940)—both for John Ford, with whom he did much of his finest work—and the subtly persuasive jury member in Twelve Angry Men (1957), but his roles ranged wide and his successes were numerous. He was an engagingly absent-minded dupe, turning the tables on Barbara Stanwyck in Preston Sturges's sparkling comedy The Lady Eve (1941), the voice of conscience in William...