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His son Peter begs to differ. He ranks his dad's Shakespearean roles, which include a performance in Twelfth Night, right up there with the rest of his body of understated work.
"My dad was very strange about doing accents or anything like that," says Peter Fonda, who stars in a version of Shakespeare's The Tempest tomorrow night at 9 on NBC and CITY.
Give us Henry Fonda accent examples.
"Dad played John Ford's version of Graham Greene's The Power And The Glory. It was called The Fugitive and he plays a Mexican priest who obviously was born in Grand Island, Nebraska," he says.
"He did a movie called Blockade, which was about Franco and the people in Spain, the revolution in Spain, and he was a Spanish landholder who had come back from America. Obviously he had spent most of his time in Grand Island, Nebraska."
Which is all by way of Peter Fonda saying of his own Shakespearan role, "If he could get away with it, what the heck?"
Tomorrow night, Fonda stars in The Tempest, a special effects-laden take on Shakespeare's tale of magic and brotherly rivalry. In this telling, it's set on a Mississippi bayou during the Civil War.
Fonda plays sorcerer Gideon Prosper, who is betrayed by his younger brother Anthony (John Glover). Oz's Harold Perrineau Jr. and Katherine Heigl co-star.
At 58, Fonda looks more like his late, great father with every passing year. With a full grey beard grown for this part and dressed in faded jeans, a T-shirt, blazer and lizard cowboy boots, he also looks not too far from his rural home life in Montana.
"Life in Montana is very nice. It's very civil and quiet for me. I like to trout fish and I like to be out in the open," Fonda says.
It was there that he first read the script for last year's acclaimed film Ulee's Gold, finding the role that brought him the Golden Globe for best actor and an Oscar nomination.
Ironically, it also brought a wave of pre-Oscar buzz and publicity demands that kept him away from that home for months. But Fonda professes to enjoy the promotional part of his profession.
"It is in my nature to do that," he says. "I find it easy to do."
In one famous instance more than 30 years ago, he also found it stimulating. He was in Toronto doing interviews for The Trip in 1967 when he came up with the idea for Easy Rider, the road movie that would make him, for one generation at least, forever Captain America. Thirty-one years later -- although he muses, "Seems like a couple of days, you know," -- he still finds that funny.
"People have been commenting about my understated performance in Ulee's Gold," he says, laughing.
"I wonder if they understand how many words I said in Easy Rider. Talk about understatement. 'Wow, man. Far out. That's beautiful man.' "
Easy Rider was the first time he appeared in a film with his daughter Bridget -- she was four at the time -- something they repeated 24 years later in Bodies, Rest And Motion.
He hopes they'll work together in the family way again soon in his movie remake of the gangster/hostage drama The Petrified Forest.
It was a Humphrey Bogart film in the '30s, but because it was also a TV drama starring Henry Fonda in 1955, Peter Fonda knows whom his performance will be measured against. By his measure, he doesn't mind.
"It's an honour to be compared to his style of acting."