I think it’s telling that my first thought when I’d heard Dolly Parton had died at 80 was, “I wonder how Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin are feeling?” The trio just had the one movie together in the 1980s, though we know for a fact they had a fondness for their time together. We know this because they reunited in 2022 for the final season of Grace & Frankie in which Tomlin and Fonda had starred, and Parton had cameoed. At that point they’d been in each others’ lives for more than 40 years.
Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin famously met in the late seventies when the former showed up at the latter’s one woman comedy show. A couple of years later, Fonda reportedly recruited Dolly Parton for a glorious movie she'd envisioned for the big screen. That film was the female-fronted 9 to 5, a movie she’d dreamt up, but was later written and directed by Colin Higgins.
