Jane Fonda simply refused to let it go this time.
Just after Barbra Streisand took the stage at the 2026 Academy Awards to deliver an emotional In Memoriam tribute to the late Robert Redford, Fonda stood on the red carpet at the Vanity Fair Oscars Party and asked the question that had apparently been sitting with her since the ceremony ended.
“I wanna know how come Streisand was up there doing that for Redford?” Fonda told Entertainment Tonight. “She only made one movie with him. I made four. I have more to say.”
Fonda, at 88 years old, had no problem telling reporters exactly how she felt about Streisand’s tribute.
She did not couch it. She did not walk it back. She made her case in three sentences and moved on. She is also, strictly on the facts, correct.
What Four Films Is Fonda Talking About?
Jane Fonda and Robert Redford made four films together across five decades. They started in 1966 with The Chase, then Barefoot in the Park in 1967, The Electric Horseman in 1979, and finally Our Souls at Night in 2017, a Netflix drama in which they played elderly neighbors who begin a tender, quiet late-life romance.
That last film, made when Fonda was 79 and Redford was 81, was among the most affecting work either of them had done in years. It felt like a farewell and a love letter simultaneously.
Barbra Streisand made one film with Redford. The Way We Were, in 1973. It is a great film, a genuine classic, and their chemistry in it is undeniable. But it is one film. Against four.
Fonda also made no secret of what those films and that friendship meant to her personally.
“I was always in love with him,” she told ET on the same red carpet. “The most gorgeous human being and such great values and he did a lot for movies. He really changed movies, lifted up independent movies.”
When Redford died in September at 89, Fonda released a statement that read:
“It hit me hard this morning when I read that Bob was gone. I can’t stop crying. He meant a lot to me and was a beautiful person in every way.” She called him someone who “stood for an America we have to keep fighting for.”
That is the language of someone who genuinely lost a person they loved. Her pointed comment at the Vanity Fair party carries all of that weight behind it.
How Did Streisand Pay Tribute To Redford?
To understand why Fonda’s remark landed the way it did, you have to understand what Streisand’s tribute actually was, because it was genuinely extraordinary, which may be precisely the point.
Streisand, 83, performed a section of The Way We Were at the Oscars, a rare moment given that she has effectively retired from live performance since 2019.
Her appearance had been rumored but still brought a jolt of electricity to the proceedings. The audience rose to its feet.
Before singing, Streisand spoke for nearly four minutes.
She called Redford “an intellectual cowboy who blazed his own trail,” honoring both his screen legacy and his decades of real-world activism for the environment, press freedom, and independent filmmaking through the Sundance Institute.
She recalled how Redford originally turned down the role in The Way We Were because he felt the character had no backbone, how he eventually agreed after the script was strengthened, and how their friendship endured for decades after the film wrapped.
She drew a direct line between the film’s McCarthy-era setting and the present day, praising Redford for defending freedom of the press and noting that filmmakers he championed at Sundance were sitting in the audience that night as Oscar nominees.
She revealed that in the last note she ever wrote to him, she signed it “Babs,” the nickname he had always called her and she had always pretended to despise, and wrote: “I love you, too.” The audience was on its feet before she finished singing.
It was, by every measure, a beautiful tribute from a woman who loved him. Their friendship of more than fifty years was real. One film does not make a relationship, and theirs was genuine.
Fonda was there for all of it. She watched the woman who made one film with her friend take the stage at Hollywood’s biggest night while she sat in the audience.
The History Behind Fonda’s Jab
What makes Fonda’s comment more than a celebrity jab is the depth of her own history with Redford, history that never got its moment on that stage.
Their first collaboration, The Chase in 1966, was a sprawling Arthur Penn film about racial violence and mob mentality in the American South, with Redford as a wrongly accused man and Fonda as his married former lover.
Barefoot in the Park the following year was lighter, a Neil Simon comedy about newlyweds adjusting to Manhattan life, but established a warmth and ease between them that would carry through every project they made together.
By The Electric Horseman in 1979, directed by Sydney Pollack, the same director who made The Way We Were, Fonda and Redford played off each other with the comfort of old friends.
The film was a modest hit, but it deepened a working relationship that had now stretched across more than a decade and two very different eras of Hollywood.
And then Our Souls at Night, forty years later. Based on Kent Haruf’s novel, the film asked both of them to play something genuinely vulnerable, loneliness, late-life longing, the courage it takes to reach out to another person when you have spent years alone.
Redford was 81. Fonda was 79.
That is five decades of collaboration, four films, and a friendship that ran from the height of the New Hollywood era through to its twilight.
When the Academy assembled its tribute to Robert Redford, they called Barbra Streisand.
To be clear about what Fonda said, she did not attack Streisand personally. She did not claim the tribute was undeserved.
She asked a pointed, specific, entirely legitimate question about why someone with a much shorter creative history with Redford was chosen over someone who had spent fifty years making films with him.
The answer probably involves The Way We Were being the most famous thing Redford ever made, and Streisand being one of the few performers on the planet who can still stop an Oscars broadcast cold.
The Academy made a calculation about what would make the best television, and it worked.
But Jane Fonda was in love with Robert Redford. She made four films with him. She cried when he died. And she had more to say.
She still does.
