A clip of Jane Fonda signing her acceptance speech at the 1979 Academy Awards has resurfaced on Twitter.
Fonda - now 84 - won the Best Actress Oscar for her role in Coming Home, in which she played a military wife learning about the effects of the Vietnam War.
Back in the 1970s, the Oscar's broadcast didn't offer closed captions, making the words and speeches inaccessible to deaf viewers. To remedy this, devoted activist Fonda took matters into her own hands by signing along as she spoke.
The 2022 Oscar ceremony last weekend saw another triumph for the deaf community, this time in the form of Best Picture winner Coda, which tells the story of the hearing child of a deaf family.
Nominated for just three Academy Awards, the indie family drama was a massive underdog at this year's awards show. But that didn't stop it from bagging the biggest prize of the night.
In the wake of Coda's historic success, a clip of Fonda signing her Best Actress acceptance speech has gained huge popularity on Twitter, racking up hundreds of thousands of likes and over 35,000 retweets.
The video shows the actress on stage addressing the audience in both words and sign language. "I'm signing part of what I'm saying tonight because while we were making the movie we all became more aware of the problems of the handicapped," she says.
"Over 14 million people are deaf. They are the invisible handicapped and can't share this evening. So this is my way of acknowledging them," the star adds as her audience applauds.
The tweet is captioned: "Jane Fonda signed her best actress speech in 1979 because the Oscars wouldn't offer closed captions."
Although the tweet goes on to claim that "the oscars only started providing closed captions in 2021," many people in the captions point out that this is incorrect, and that the Academy began captioning their awards ceremony just a few years after Fonda's speech in 1982.
"The Academy Awards were literally the first live program to utilize closed-captioning in 1982 and have been captioned ever since," read one comment, alongside a news report from the time.