She had learned to cope with his habits by the time they worked together on the 2017 film Our Souls at Night, she said, and she praised his sense of humour.
“The last movie I made with him was six years ago. What was I, about 80 years old or something like that. And I finally knew I had grown up. When he would come on the set three hours late in a bad mood, I knew it wasn’t my fault. We always had a good time.”
She revealed she had fond memories of Lee Marvin, her co-star in the 1965 Western comedy Cat Ballou, but also recalled his hard drinking.
“I loved making the movie. And Lee Marvin was fabulous. He was very funny. He was always drunk. We stayed at the same motel and they had to carry him up the stairs.
“We would shoot sometimes 14 hours a day. And Lee Marvin took me aside and he said, ‘Fonda, we’re the stars of this movie. If we allow them to work us so many hours, we’re not the ones that get hurt. It’s the crew. We have to stand up for the workers, for the crew, and we have to refuse to work these long hours. We have to stand up for the crew.’
”And that had never occurred to me. That was a huge lesson from Lee Marvin.”
