The daughters of Patsy Cline and Loretta Lynn have given a new movie about their mothers' friendship a big thumbs up, insisting Megan Hilty and Jessie Mueller have nailed their performances.
Cline's daughter, Julie Fudge, and Lynn's daughter, Patsy Lynn Russell - who is named after the late Cline - served as co-producers on TV movie Patsy & Loretta and they insist the project captures the moving story of their mums' relationship.
"It was just a really powerful friendship," Russell tells Taste of Country. "There was a seven-year age difference between (my mom) and her closest sister, and she wasn't one to make friends. She got married young, and my dad took her away to the state of Washington, where she lived for 13 years before she got into the music business, and she never had a girlfriend. So Patsy was that person to her.
"This is about true friendship, and this is about how we as women, the kinds of friendships we all seek in our life. One of the things that my mom said was, 'Everybody needs a Patsy in their life.' And everybody needs a Loretta. You want those kinds of friends that have your back, and you can fall back on them."
Loretta's daughter admits the new TV movie is a big improvement on the 1985 Cline biopic Sweet Dreams, in which Jessica Lange portrayed Patsy - and landed an Oscar nomination.
"When my mom watched Sweet Dreams, she hated it," Russell adds. "She just hated it. She said, 'I didn't know that Patsy and (husband) Charlie Dick. These are strangers in this movie to me.' Mom said, 'I never heard Patsy use horrible foul language, and she was not a partier.'"
Fudge agrees, revealing she wasn't a fan of Sweet Dreams: "The fact is that anybody who knew my dad knew that he wasn't the monster that has been created in the past. Having spoken with many, many people who knew my father, including my stepmother, I never saw or knew of Dad to be the brutal person that they have shown him to be."
Cline died in a plane crash in 1963 at the age of 30.
Patsy & Loretta is set to premiere on the U.S. network Lifetime on 19 October.
