Lily Tomlin celebrated her 87th birthday on September 1 and was photographed during a rare public outing that same day. In photos obtained by the Daily Mail, the actress was seen visiting a fitness studio in Los Angeles, California.
Lily Tomlin Seen in Rare Public Outing on her 87th Birthday
Tomlin looked comfortable and chic. She wore an all-white outfit: white pants, a white blouse, and white sneakers. The outing comes a week after the loss of her beloved friend and former “9 to 5” co-star Dolly Parton, who died from cancer on August 25. She was 80.
Tomlin and Parton were friends, and when Parton’s death was announced, Tomlin was among those to pay tribute. She shared her heartbreak in a post on X on August 25. She wrote, “Friend. Songwriter. The Great Harmonizer of Humanity. Dolly, Dolly, Dolly. Forever Dolly.” She also posted a black-and-white throwback photo of Parton.
The comedy film “9 to 5” was released in 1980 and starred Parton, Tomlin, and Jane Fonda. Parton was already a country music icon, but the film was her theatrical debut, and she came prepared. “I’d fully memorized the entire script because I’d no idea that we would be doing just bits and pieces at a time,” she told The Australian Women’s Weekly in 1980, ABC News reports. “Why, I was ready to do the whole thing the first day.”
Lily Tomlin Embraces Aging & Changes in Hollywood
Tomlin is a successful actress whose career has spanned decades and includes the beloved Netflix series, “Grace and Frankie,” which aired from 2015 until 2022. Tomlin starred alongside Fonda.
In an interview with Elle in April 2016, she discussed how Hollywood was notoriously ageist, with leading roles often drying up for women after they reach a certain age. The publication asked her “what issue of aging felt more important” to address in the show, to which Tomlin replied, “The discounting of older women. We did that in one of the episodes where we went to a supermarket in the first season and the young guy who was manning the cash register didn’t acknowledge us.”
She continued, “We’re screaming and shouting and trying to get his attention, and he doesn’t hear us or see us. He sees a real voluptuous young girl come in and gives all his attention to her. There’s just so much of that. It’s not funny. But it’s all this stuff about women having to start over. Having the rug pulled out from under them. We finally get around to finding a way to levitate ourselves, rather than fall on our behinds. I’m really the age of Frankie, but I always forget it.”
Tomlin also revealed she never expected to get a role like this so late in her career, and she showed her appreciation for it. She admitted she had other projects lined up and wasn’t concerned about being unemployed, but she never believed she would “have a series and certainly not one on Netflix.”
