Jane Fonda's threesome heartache

The Oscar-winning actress tells how her former husband bullied her into inviting other women to join them in bed.

On one occasion, Vadim is said to have phoned an escort agency and ordered a beautiful redhead for a threesome.

Miss Fonda, 67, makes the claims in her autobiography, My Life So Far, which is to be published in the U.S. next month. Snippets of the book have already been leaked.

In the book, she explains how Vadim, who was previously married to Brigitte Bardot, encouraged her to find women to join them in bed.

The French director suggested she chat them up using techniques gleaned from her Oscarwinning performance as a prostitute in the 1971 movie Klute.

She says she agreed to the sexual encounters because Vadim played on her insecurities, making her feel 'less than perfect' and obliged to fulfill his sexual fantasies.

'For me with Roger Vadim, that meant bringing other women into our bed,' she writes in the book.

'It seems shocking that I did that, but I managed to convince myself that it was fine, that I wanted to, even though it was killing my heart.'

Miss Fonda describes how Vadim - who directed her in the 1968 scifi sexual spoof Barbarella - once ordered a red-haired prostitute from the Madame Claud escort agency in France.

In a scene which could have come from one of his sexuallycharged movies, she tells how the woman joined the couple for a threesome. Miss Fonda married

Vadim, the father of her daughter Vanessa, in 1967. She describes her ex-husband, who died in 2000, as 'cruel and misogynistic' and claims he forced her into other forms of group sex.

Rumours about the couple's sexual behaviour have been the subject of Hollywood speculation for years. Miss Fonda blames her relationship-with Vadim for the eating disorders that plagued her for much of her life.

'I ceased eating except for crusts from his bread and rinds from his camembert,' she says.

She believes Vadim's behaviour echoed that of her father, Henry Fonda, during her childhood.

Her mother, socialite Frances Seymour, had mental health problems and committed suicide when Miss Fonda was 12.

She grew up to become one of America's most controversial actresses.

She won two best actress Oscars, for Klute in 1971 and Coming Home in 1978.

But she became a national hate figure in the U.S. in 1972 when her opposition to the Vietnam War culminated in her posing with an enemy tank in Hanoi.

She divorced Vadim in 1973 and went on to marry twice more.

Her marriages to radical politician Tom Hayden in 1973 and CNN founder Ted Turner in 1991 both ended in divorce.