Dolly Parton: 5 Essential Movies

Dolly Parton always an abundance of stage presence, dating back to her early days with Porter Wagoner. The surprise wasn’t that she ended up parlaying her bubbly personality, her folksy charm, and her comic timing into a big-screen career, but that it took almost a decade before someone finally cast her in a movie. From her debut about women taking workplace sexists to a gospel-tinged musical comedy, here are five essential movies to check out on this national day of mourning. We’ll miss you, Dolly.

Dolly had already been a major country singer and songwriter, as well as a constant presence on TV and The Tonight Show , for close to a decade when Jane Fonda recruited Parton to play Doralee Rhodes, the secretary to who threatens to turn Dabney Colman’s male-chauvinist-pig of a boss “from a rooster to a hen.” Parton’s big-screen debut earned her a Golden Globe nomination right out of the gate, with everybody singling out the movie’s revenge-fantasy sequence when Parton lassos and hog-ties Colman like she was a state rodeo champ. But it’s the scenes of the three women bonding that make this film sing; you’d have thought that she’d been making comedies with her costars Fonda and Lily Tomlin for years. Speaking of singing: Parton had been clicking out a rhythm on her acrylic nails in between takes, occasionally pairing it with lyrics about the trials of working women. The result would end up becoming the movie’s iconic theme and a No. 1 hit on both the country and adult-contemporary charts. What a way to make a living. —David Fear