Jane Fonda opened the 17th Annual TCM Classic Film Festival Thursday night with a frank, funny and unexpectedly political tribute to her late co-star Robert Redford — walking back her widely quoted dig at Barbra Streisand, confessing to a decades-long crush, and invoking Redford’s name to take a sharp swing at Hollywood’s pending studio mergers.
The event at the TCL Chinese Theatre in Hollywood paired a screening of Barefoot in the Park, the 1967 Neil Simon comedy that first teamed Fonda and Redford, with an onstage conversation between Fonda and TCM host Ben Mankiewicz. Redford died in September 2025 at age 89. They made four films together across five decades — The Chase, Barefoot in the Park, The Electric Horseman and Our Souls at Night.
At the Vanity Fair Oscar party in March, Fonda had told Entertainment Tonight she wanted to know “how come Streisand was up there doing that for Redford — she only made one movie with him; I made four.” The remark went viral. On Thursday, Fonda wasted little time addressing it. “I thought I was being funny,” she told the crowd, adding that she found the tribute “fabulous” and that “Bob would have liked it.”
The more revealing stretch of the evening concerned Fonda’s own feelings for her co-star. She described their first encounter on the 1966 film The Chase, when both were married. “I asked him, ‘Do you ever have affairs?'” she recalled. “He said, ‘Well, if I was going to have an affair, it would be with somebody that was like a hooker.'” The attraction, she admitted, persisted across every film they made together. “I had such a crush on him, and it was painful,” she said, recalling scenes shot in bed together: “He was supposed to be asleep, so he acted like he was sleeping. But I had such a crush on him.”
Fonda also turned the evening toward current industry politics. She cited Redford’s support for independent cinema and the Sundance Film Festival before warning the audience that the pending Warner Bros.-Paramount merger would undermine what he stood for. “When I look at what’s happening in this town — when I look at the pending mergers — if that goes through, we’re going to lose what Bob was trying to do. We have to fight. I want to fight in the spirit of Robert Redford.” TCM is a Warner Bros. Discovery property currently headed toward Paramount, lending her words an extra charge in the room.
The festival, themed “The World Comes to Hollywood,” runs through Sunday, May 3.
