“I’m in awe of it”: The co-star Jane Fonda described as “the opposite of me”
Genuine friendships are a hard thing to come by in a place as cutthroat as Hollywood, but Jane Fonda has managed to maintain one of the most fruitful personal and professional relationships of her career since the late 1970s.
After making her screen debut in 1960’s rom-com Tall Story, the second-generation star rapidly evolved from being ‘Henry Fonda’s daughter’ into a superstar in her own right, quickly establishing herself as one of the most naturally gifted performers of her generation.
Notching two Academy Award wins from five nominations by the end of the following decade to go along with a pair of Baftas and six Golden Globes, Fonda’s talent was never in doubt. However, her outspoken activism saw her become persona non grata in many industry circles, forcing her to take charge of her own destiny.
It wasn’t until 1980 that Fonda and Lily Tomlin shared the screen for the first time alongside Dolly Parton as the leads of cult classic workplace comedy 9 to 5, but they’d already been friends for years at that point, having first met when the former went backstage at the latter’s one-woman show, and they immediately hit it off.
Since then they’ve re-teamed on the big screen in Paul Weitz’s Moving On and Kyle Marvin’s 80 for Brady, as well as playing the two leads in Netflix’s Grace & Frankie. One of the streaming service’s longest-running episodic originals, the show lasted seven seasons and 94 episodes, with both stars receiving Primetime Emmy nominations for ‘Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series’ along the way.
Their bond has been nigh-on unbreakable for over 45 years, and as Fonda explained to The Hollywood Reporter, one of the reasons they get on so well is because they’re completely different people. “She’s got this funny bone that’s just innate, and I’m in awe of it because it’s the opposite of me,” she said. “I come from a long line of depressives.”
That applies to their respective career paths, too, with Fonda making her name in hard-hitting drama while Tomlin first gained fame for her stand-up and sketch comedy stylings. They come from different disciplines and have regularly had vastly different outlooks on life, which has only served to strengthen the decades-spanning friendship between them.
Tomlin shared Fonda’s assessment of their friendship, referring to her as “just sort of a dear and like a young girl with such idea and ambitions,” which “always made me smile.” One was born into Hollywood royalty, and the other hailed from more humble roots as the daughter of a housewife and a factory worker, but as it applies to the unbreakable bond of the two awards-laden and distinguished veteran legends of stage and screen, opposites really do attract.
