Jane Fonda broke down remembering Dolly Parton in a tearful new interview.
The 88-year-old Oscar winner sat with Democracy Now! Last week to speak about her “9 to 5” co-star, who died Aug. 25 at age 80 after what her family called a brief battle with cancer. Fonda’s voice cracked as she distilled Parton’s legacy to a single word.
“She meant love,” Fonda said through tears. “She really did. She loved everyone.”
Fonda recalled how Parton had taken her under wing decades earlier, when the actress was preparing to play a hillbilly in 1984’s “The Dollmaker.” The two spent 10 days together on a tour bus through Appalachia, Missouri, Tennessee and Arkansas.
“I was in deep hollows of Tennessee and Arkansas where people lived in tarpaper shacks with no electricity or running water, and she would come in in her full regalia, I never saw her without full regalia,” Fonda said. “And they loved her so much, that they accepted my presence. And it was so clear that she absolutely respected them.”
Parton also taught Fonda the importance of respecting fans, she said. “That was why there was so much love. She never played down, she always was pulled together, she was always who she was out of respect for her fans,” Fonda gushed. “She knew from the get-go who she was.”
The “Grace and Frankie” star admired how Parton controlled her own narrative and career. “She knew that people would make fun of who she was because of how she looked. And so she did it first, and she did it so smart and she was always in charge of her life,” Fonda said.
Parton’s intelligence struck Fonda just as powerfully. “She wasn’t dumb. She had the ability, like X-Ray vision, she could see through people to their essence. Whatever the outside was, she could see, good or bad, to the essence of a person,” she said.
The two women first connected on the set of “9 to 5,” the 1980 office comedy that marked Parton’s film debut. Fonda had conceived the project as a darker tale until she caught Tomlin’s one-woman show and heard Parton’s “Two Doors Down” on the radio during the drive home.
“And I suddenly saw Dolly,” Fonda recalled. “She’s a secretary, she’s typing, she can’t see her fingers. I thought, ‘Dolly, Lily and Jane.’ Needless to say, we had to approach it a little differently. It became an outright comedy and directed by Colin Higgins and the rest is history.”
Parton came to set extraordinarily prepared. “First day of work, she shows up and she’s memorized the entire script. She thought that she was supposed to learn it all,” Fonda laughed.
Fonda called Parton’s title track for the film the “anthem of the secretaries movement.”
Parton’s death was announced by her nephew following what the family described as a brief, unspecified cancer battle. Reports said the country music icon was laid to rest over the weekend in Nashville beside her husband, Carl Dean, who died last March at 82.
After the news broke, Fonda had already shared a lengthy tribute on Instagram, remembering the Grammy winner as a “naughty, playful southern gal.” In her Democracy Now! Interview, she returned to what made Parton irreplaceable.
“She was always in charge of her talent, her business and her career,” Fonda said.
Parton and Fonda starred alongside Lily Tomlin in the hit film as three office workers plotting revenge against their sexist boss, played by the late Dabney Coleman. The comedy became a cultural touchstone and launched Parton’s acting career.
Fonda’s Instagram tribute and her emotional interview marked two of many remembrances that poured in from across the entertainment world following Parton’s death.