Dolly Parton once recalled how she initially clashed with her Steel Magnolias director, Herbert Ross, who was apparently also harsh on a young Julia Roberts.
Parton starred in the 1989 film – about a group of women supporting each other through life’s ups and downs – alongside Roberts, Sally Field, Shirley MacLaine, Daryl Hannah and Olympia Dukakis.
However, it wasn’t the smoothest of experiences, with the queen of country, who played beauty salon owner Truvy Jones, claiming Ross “didn’t particularly like me” and “resented” having to use Roberts.
“He told me I couldn’t act,” she wrote in her 1994 autobiography, Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business, People reports. “This was not news to me, and I told him so.
“‘I’m not an actress, I’m Dolly Parton,’” she told Ross. “‘I’m a personality who has been hired to do this movie. You’re the director. It’s your job to make me look like I’m acting.’ By the end of the film, we had all made peace and become friends.”
Parton’s memory of the shoot with the late director was echoed by Field, who in a 2024 interview with Vulture confirmed that they had helped Roberts when Ross “picked on” her.
open image in galleryWhile Field said she was given the “freedom to do whatever”, Ross was “very, very, very hard on [Roberts]”, who at the time was in the early stages of her career and filming her fourth credited movie role.
“We would all rally around Julia, because she was the baby,” Field said. “She was sort of the newcomer. And she was wonderful, and [Ross] just picked on her. It was awful.”
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Field said that they would all come to Roberts’s aid, and remembered Parton once turning on Ross, “always with humour, but usually the most vulgar humour you ever heard so that it was like, you just literally don’t have a leg to stand on”.
Stories of Parton’s kindness and generosity have been doing the rounds since news broke of the “9-5” star’s death on Tuesday 25 August, aged 80, after a “brief battle” with cancer.
Another Steel Magnolias anecdote that has resurfaced comes from an interview with Roberts on The Oprah Winfrey Show while promoting the movie.
There, the Pretty Woman star shared the crucial lesson she’d learned from Parton on a particularly sweltering day of shooting in Louisiana.
open image in gallery“Everyone had ice on their wrist and was doing the whole thing, everyone was like, ‘It’s hot, can I get some water?’” Roberts said, reflecting on how she’d urged Parton to complain, too.
“And I finally just had to say, ‘Dolly, I mean, you’ve got a wig and the wool. Come on, it’s hot, sweat a little, you know? Just say ‘I’m hot,’ you know. ‘This is a drag!’
“And she said – I remember we were sitting on the porch, do you remember this? And she said to me, ‘When I was a little girl, I wanted to be famous and I wanted to be rich, and now I’m both those things. I’m not going to complain about it.’”
Roberts said that she took the advice to never complain very seriously and that she’s “never forgotten it.”