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Jane Fonda feels the values that her friend Robert Redford stood for are slipping away.
The “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” star died Tuesday at the age of 89. The Hollywood icon, who founded the Sundance Institute, died at his home in the mountains outside Provo, Utah, in his sleep. No cause of death has been given at this time.
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“It hit me hard this morning when I read that Bob was gone,” Fonda, who shared a six-decade friendship with the fellow Oscar winner, said in a statement to Entertainment Weekly and E! News. “I can’t stop crying. He meant a lot to me and was a beautiful person in every way.”
The “Klute” star concluded her statement by urging people to keep Redford’s style of patriotism alive.
“He stood for an America we have to keep fighting for,” Fonda said.
Outside of his legendary acting and directing career, the “All the President’s Men” star was outspoken about his liberal political views and longstanding support for the Democratic Party. He was even awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by former President Barack Obama in 2016 in recognition of his decades of activism for environmentalism.
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Redford was also an outspoken critic of President Donald Trump, and often took aim at the former reality TV star and failed businessman’s attacks on democracy.
“We’re up against a crisis I never thought I’d see in my lifetime: a dictator-like attack by President Donald Trump on everything this country stands for,” Redford wrote in a 2019 op-ed piece for NBC.
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He added that “our shared tolerance and respect for the truth, our sacred rule of law, our essential freedom of the press and our precious freedoms of speech — all have been threatened by a single man.”
During the 2020 presidential campaign between former President Joe Biden and Trump, Redford endorsed Biden in an op-ed for CNN. In the piece, Redford wrote about how Trump was actively dividing the country.
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“Instead of a moral compass in the Oval Office, there’s a moral vacuum,” Redford wrote. “Instead of a president who says we’re all in it together, we have a president who’s in it for himself. Instead of words that uplift and unite, we hear words that inflame and divide.”
He added, “Four more years would accelerate our slide toward autocracy. It would be taken as a free license to punish more so-called ‘traitors’ and wage more petty vendettas—with the full weight of the Justice Department behind him.”
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Fonda, who is also known for her activism and left-leaning political views, struck up a friendship with Redford early in their acting careers and co-starred in numerous projects together, including 1966’s “The Chase,” 1967’s “Barefoot in the Park,” 1979’s “The Electric Horseman” and 2017’s “Our Souls at Night.”
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The two were beloved for their chemistry and seemed to sincerely enjoy working with one another.
“It’s easy,” Redford told Today in 2017 what it’s like working with Fonda. “We’ve done many films over the years so it just worked out that way, that there was not a lot of discussion, we didn’t have to talk about a lot. Things just kind of fell into place between us, and there wasn’t much more to think about.”