Jane Fonda tearfully mourned the death of her friend and “9 to 5” co-star Dolly Parton following the singer’s death last week.
“She meant love,” Fonda said through tears when asked what the country icon meant to her during an interview with Democracy Now! “She really did. She loved everyone.”
The Oscar-winning actress recalled Parton taking her under her wing and showing her how to be a “hillbilly” while Fonda was prepping for her role in 1984’s “The Dollmaker.”
“I spent 10 days with her on a tour bus. Touring Appalachia, Missouri, Tennessee, Arkansas because I was about to play a hillbilly. Dolly’s the only hillbilly I knew, so she helped me find a hillbilly that I could base my character on,” the 88-year-old said.
“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. And they loved her so much, that they accepted my presence. And it was so clear that she absolutely respected them.”
Fonda also shared that Parton “taught [her] the importance of acknowledging and respecting fans.”
“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 said she admired how Parton “was always in charge of her talent, her business and her 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.”
The “Klute” star also recalled Parton’s brains and how well she broke the dumb blond stereotype that was often thrust upon her.
“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.”
Parton and Fonda met when they starred in “9 to 5,” alongside Lily Tomlin, as three office workers who plot revenge against their sexist and terrible boss, played by the late Dabney Coleman.
The film was a massive hit and was Parton’s first movie role. Fonda revealed that the office comedy was going to be much “darker” until she thought of Tomlin and Parton to star in it.
Fonda recalled being “smitten” after watching Tomlin’s one-woman show and “had never seen that kind of brilliance before.” On the drive home from the show, “Two Doors Down” by Dolly Parton started playing on the radio.
“And I suddenly saw Dolly,” she 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.”
“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.
She also called Parton’s track for the movie, the “anthem of the secretaries movement.”
Parton’s death was announced by her nephew on Aug. 25, following a “brief battle” with unspecified cancer. She was 80.
After the heartbreaking news, Fonda shared a lengthy tribute to her friend via Instagram, remembering the Grammy winner as a “naughty, playful southern gal.”
Page Six confirmed the country music icon was laid to rest over the weekend in Nashville beside her beloved husband, Carl Dean, who died last March at age 82.
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