No matter what age she was, Dolly was a stunner.
On August 25, 2026, Dolly Parton sadly passed away at 80-years-old in Nashville Tennessee. Dolly had been dealing with undisclosed health issues for the last year or so, and she previously shared that she was having issues with severe kidney stones. Dolly’s reps confirmed she sadly died following a “brief battle with cancer,” though the specific kind was not revealed.
In an interview with Gayle King for CBS Mornings this week, Dolly’s younger sister, Stella, opened up about the passing of her beloved sister, speaking on everything from Dolly’s political beliefs to her marriage to her husband of nearly 60 years, Carl Dean.
And she also talked about Dolly’s iconic look, and the plastic surgery Dolly had throughout her career, which she was very open about with the public too.
Dolly has talked abut her surgeries very publicly, and of course, we all know she had breast augmentation and lifts early on and maintaining them over the years. She denied ever getting silicone injections or anything directly injected into her breasts, but she has admitted to having facelifts and various eye or brow lifts and fillers like Botox. She also talked about having minor liposuction and other body-tucked procedures, and she maintained that iconic look for decades.
She was very careful about the kinds of doctors she used for these procedures too, and on The Howard Stern Show a few years ago, Dolly cautioned people to be very careful about who they let any sort of cosmetic procedures on their body, referencing her longtime friend Kenny Rogers when explaining how people can heal differently, even if you do go to the best of the best plastic surgeon like he did:
“I always say, just find the best doctors. Some of my celebrity friends, I give them the names of the doctors that I’ve used. But you’ve just gotta be very careful not to overdo it, ‘cuz you never know, anytime you go under knife, you could come out looking not good.
Just like when Kenny Rogers… it’s especially hard for men, because you can’t wear the makeup and all the different eyelashes and stuff, and that was one of the best doctors. You just never know how you’re gonna heal, where it’s gonna go, so you absolutely need to find the best doctors, the most talked about doctors are the ones highly recommended.
If you’re gonna do anything about your face, you can cover up stuff if someone screws up things on your body, but boy, if you live with your face out there, you gotta be careful. So I try to do just little bits at a time, I don’t do really big stuff. And then I do fillers, botox and Juvederm, or whatever, only when I have to. And even then, I try to be careful.”
Plenty of celebrities lie about the kind of work they had done, but of course that was never Dolly’s style, and there’s a reason her look became so incredibly iconic. She was stunning, long before she ever had any work done, and she remained beautiful for her entire life. Her outward beauty was obvious, but her inner light certainly contributed a great deal to the kind of truly beautiful person she was in a huge way.
Dolly said all the time that when she was young, all she wanted was to be pretty, and she would get in trouble for wearing “makeup” (she picked berries and things of that nature) as a little girl. She famously modeled her look as an adult after the “town tramp” she used to see around town as a girl.
Dolly also slept in her makeup, and stayed ready at all times… and I mean that in a very literal sense.
Truly, even her own family members didn’t see her not looking like the Dolly Parton the world knew (I think her husband Carl Dean might have been the only one), and Stella said she never did, either:
“I did not… nope. Not after she got to be ‘Dolly Parton.’ She would sleep in her makeup when she would come spend the night with me. Yeah. I wouldn’t, I’d sleep with a pillow over my head, you know… I knew what she looked like, she looked like me without her makeup, so I knew what she looked like without it.”
And even though Dolly was incredibly confident, and mostly beloved, there were certainly critics of her looks, and Stella recalled a flight to LA when Dolly had a little wine and got “emotional” over some of the public opinion on a recent facelift she had done.
She told Stella she just didn’t want to get “old and ugly,” and didn’t want to be seen that way. She always wanted to be the “Dolly” the world loved, and clearly, that really affected her as she got older and tried to evolve while still being that charming Dolly:
“She was so funny, though… the opposite of me in a lot of ways, but we were very close. But she said when she’d had a facelift and people had been saying stuff when she had her face done, and we were on a plane, we were flying to LA, and we’d had a little wine, and she got a little emotional.
She says, ‘Well, I don’t wanna get old and ugly.’ She said, ‘I don’t want people to see me as old and ugly.’ I said, ‘Oh I do.’ I said, ‘I wanna get so old and ugly I scare little children at the airport.’ It was just the opposite, you know, she wanted to always be Dolly. And I don’t care.”
It’s fascinating to hear about that side of Dolly, because she always seemed immortal and untouchable in terms of ever letting the world affect her, though I know that she is a human and that certainly wasn’t the case.
I think most of us would agree that we always saw her as that effervescent “Dolly,” but just like all of us, she had feelings and the world even got to her sometimes too:
@cbsmornings Dolly and Stella Parton connected through humor, the country music star’s sister told @Gayle King. “She was so funny, though. The opposite of me in a lot of ways, but we were very close.” #dollyparton ♬ original sound – CBS Mornings
The full interview is available here:
