Jane Fonda Clarifies Robert Redford Oscars Remark at Festival

Jane Fonda said Robert Redford would have liked Barbra Streisand’s Oscars tribute, walking back a March remark about who should have introduced the performance. robert redford came back into the conversation Thursday night at the opening of the TCM Classic Film Festival, where Fonda was there for Barefoot in the Park.

At the Academy Awards in March, Streisand performed The Way We Were, the 1973 Sydney Pollack romantic drama starring Redford and Streisand. Fonda had joked at the Vanity Fair Oscar party, “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.”

Fonda at TCM

Fonda used the festival appearance to reset the line. “He’s the only person I made four movies with, and would have done a lot more if I had the chance,” she said. “But I loved him and I deeply respect him, and they didn’t ask me to do the Oscars.”

She added, “I thought I was being funny,” then made the point more directly: “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.” That turns the Oscars-night quip into something closer to a private joke than a grievance, which is the cleaner reading for anyone tracking how awards-show remarks get amplified and then corrected in public.

The Chase in 1966

Fonda also pulled the story back to 1966, when she and Redford met on The Chase. She said both were married then, and remembered asking him, “Do you ever have affairs?” Redford’s reply, as she recalled it, was, “Well, if I was going to have an affair, it would be with somebody that was like a hooker.”

She called him “the most gorgeous human being I had ever been with” and said, “I had such a crush on him and it was painful.” Fonda said she was always looking for a moment to cozy up to him or grab his hand, while also noting that the female attention around Redford could make him uncomfortable at times.

Redford, Streisand, and 2017

Fonda’s comments also pointed back to the scale of Redford’s screen legacy with her own work and with Streisand’s. She said she loved Redford’s 1984 film The Natural, though “I hated watching him kiss Glenn Close.” She also recalled that on their 2017 film Our Souls at Night, they were “in bed together all the time.”

She said Redford liked the power that came with being a movie star because it let him do Sundance and change movies, adding that he wanted “diversity, complexity, and surprises.” Her read was blunt: he could have built an empire, she said, and instead built a nest for artists to feel safe. For anyone following the festival circuit, the takeaway is simple enough: Fonda did not just retract a joke, she reframed Redford’s tribute as the right one for the song, the movie, and the man it honored.