Jane Fonda made an appearance at the opening night of the TCM Classic Film Festival on Thursday night, where she took a moment to clarify her reaction to Robert Redford‘s In Memoriam segment at the Oscars.
During the Academy Awards in March, Barbra Streisand took the stage for an emotional tribute and performance of “The Way We Were,” the title track of Sydney Pollack’s 1973 romantic drama, which starred Redford and Streisand. While on the carpet at the Vanity Fair Oscar party that night, Fonda quipped to Entertainment Tonight,” “I want to know how come Streisand was up there doing that for Redford? She only made one movie with him; I made four! I have more to say.”
Cut to Thursday, when Fonda arrived in Hollywood to celebrate her and Redford’s 1967 film Barefoot in the Park, which served as the opener for this year’s TCM fest. In a pre-screening conversation with Ben Mankiewicz, Fonda said of her frequent co-star, “He’s the only person I made four movies with, and would have done a lot more if I had the chance. But I loved him and I deeply respect him, and they didn’t ask me to do the Oscars,” to laughs from the crowd. Fonda then explained her viral moment, saying, “I thought I was being funny” in the interview, “but actually I thought it was fabulous that they had Barbra out there because that was such an iconic movie and the song was so incredibly — Bob would have liked it.”
Much of the rest of the conversation was spent revealing just how much Fonda herself liked Redford, as she recalled when the two actors met on 1966 movie The Chase; both were married at the time and she asked him, “Do you ever have affairs?” to which he responded “Well, if I was going to have an affair, it would be with somebody that was like a hooker.” She later joked how he was “just fun to be with and he was reckless also — not so reckless that he would have an affair with me, but he liked fast cars” as she described him as “the most gorgeous human being I had ever been with.”
Looking back on their multiple collaborations, Fonda admitted, “I had such a crush on him and it was painful” and she was always looking for a moment to cozy up to him or grab his hand. “The last one [2017’s Our Souls at Night] we were in bed together all the time! But nothing.” She also teased that she loved his 1984 film The Natural but “I hated watching him kiss Glenn Close.”
The female attention “made him so uncomfortable” at times, noted Fonda, as she would see women run to him and faint at his feet. “It was hard for him to be a movie star, yet he liked the power it gave him because he was able to do Sundance and change movies.”
Redford’s creation of Sundance is a major part of his legacy, with Fonda emphasizing that he wanted to push back against Hollywood’s focus on commercial projects and support independent films. “He wanted diversity, he wanted complexity, he wanted surprises,” she said. “He could have built an empire and he built a nest for artists to feel safe.”
The two stars also connected over their activist spirits, Fonda explained, with a timely message for today (and with TCM a Warner Bros. Discovery property that seems headed to Paramount): “When I look at what’s happening in this town — when I look at the pending mergers, for example, if that goes through — we’re going to lose what Bob was trying to do. I want to fight in the spirit of Robert Redford.”
