Dolly Parton Will Miss Film Academy’s Governors Awards
Dolly Parton, the legendary singer-songwriter and actress and noted philanthropist who was tapped by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ board of governors to receive its Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award at the 16th Governors Awards on Nov. 16, will not attend the ceremony in Hollywood, The Hollywood Reporter has learned.
Parton, 79, who lives in Tennessee, announced earlier this week that “health challenges” were forcing her to postpone a series of six concerts that were to have taken place in Las Vegas later this year, for which tickets sold out in less than two hours. It has been a difficult year for the fan favorite, whose husband on nearly 60 years, Carl Dean, died in March.
Previous Governors Awards honorees who were unable to attend the ceremony include John Calley, Jean-Luc Godard, James Earl Jones, Piero Tosi, Debbie Reynolds and, last year, just days after his death, Quincy Jones.
Even in her absence, Parton will surely be celebrated at the Governors Awards, alongside this year’s three recipients of honorary Oscars: actor-producer Tom Cruise, actress-producer-choreographer Debbie Allen and production designer Wynn Thomas.
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One of the most popular country music stars of all time, she made her mark on the movies as an actress (most memorably in 1980’s 9 to 5 and 1982’s The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, for which she received Golden Globe noms) and as a singer-songwriter (garnering best original song Oscar noms for “Nine to Five” from 9 to 5 and “Travelin’ Thru” from 2005’s Transamerica). But her greatest legacy may be her philanthropy.
Indeed, the daughter of a man who never learned to read has spent millions of dollars to give away more than 285 million books to children, aiming to inspire a lifelong love of reading. It’s all done through her Dollywood Foundation, which she created in 1988 with the aim of helping to educate kids from her home state of Tennessee, and the Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, which launched in 1995. 30 years later, Parton’s organization mails millions of free books every month to pre-schoolers in all 50 states, as well as in Canada, the U.K., Australia and Ireland.
Beyond that, she has also been an outspoken ally of the LGBTQ community and a pivotal supporter of medical research — as in, $2 million in donations to the Vanderbilt University Medical Center — that helped to fund the critical early stages of development of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine that saved an untold number of lives during the pandemic.
