American actress Sally Field (born 1946) vaulted to stardom in the 1960s by playing perky ingénues on the small screen and went on to an equally impressive career in feature film. For nearly three decades, noted "Variety" contributor Charles Isherwood, two-time Academy Award winner Field "has specialized in playing women whose demure exteriors have a way of cracking open to unleash torrents of outsized emotion at times of crisis."
Field grew up in the entertainment business. She was born on November 6, 1946, in Pasadena, California, to Margaret Field, a studio contract player of the era, and a pharmaceutical salesperson. After her parents divorced, her mother remarried Jock Mahoney, a working actor and stuntman whose most noted screen credit came in the 1960s as Tarzan. Both her mother and stepfather, Field later recalled, were "real working-class actors, which was really important to be around, in that I had no illusion about some glorious, glamourous, easy place," she told Back Stage West writer Jamie Painter Young.
Cast as Surfer Girl
At Birmingham High School in the San Fernando Valley, Field naturally gravitated toward the drama department, and there she was a standout. Her ebullient personality and wholesome looks landed her a spot in a Columbia Studios workshop for budding screen stars in 1964, and she was ultimately cast as the lead in a new ABC television series, Gidget, which reprised the popular surfer-teen movies of the same name. The show ran for one season, and when it ended Field thought about relocating to New York City so that she might try her luck on the stage. "I wanted to study and live on thirty-seven cents in a little apartment, and do off-off-off-off-off-off-Broadway," she said in an interview with Liz Smith for Good Housekeeping. "But I was afraid. I had never been outside of California.… I was influenced by my family, and they were frightened."
Miserable in Popular Series
ABC had canceled Gidget, but it was doing so well in summer reruns that Field was offered another title role in a new sitcom, The Flying Nun. She was asked to play Sister Bertrille, a young, irrepressible Roman Catholic nun at a Puerto Rican convent who could actually fly. Field thought the premise was ridiculous, and promptly turned it down. "I hated the whole idea," she later recalled to Entertainment Weekly writer Jeff Jensen. But then her stepfather urged her to take it. "He said, 'If you don't do this, you may never work again,'" and so she took the part.
The Flying Nun was a hit and made Field a star. In the show she wore an improbable outfit built around a traditional nun's habit with one of the more extreme, winglike forms of head covering for women's religious orders. The head covering weighed six pounds, and the flying stunts required Field to be strapped to wire contraptions. She was miserable and went through a period of depression and overeating. "I would lose 10 or 15 pounds in a week, eating nothing but cucumbers and working all day," she recalled in an interview with People writer Elizabeth Sporkin. "My hands would shake all the time, and sometimes I'd pass out. But then I would go on these enormous binges. I lived alone and was very lonely."
A sympathetic actress from the television series, Madeleine Sherwood, encouraged Field to take classes with renowned drama teacher Lee Strasberg, who held classes in Los Angeles as part of his famed Actors Studio once a year. There, Field blossomed, working alongside Jack Nicholson and Ellen Burstyn, among other young luminaries and future Oscar-winners. Returning to the set of The Flying Nun only worsened matters, however, and so on a jaunt to Las Vegas in 1968 Field married her high-school boyfriend, becoming pregnant not long afterward. To her relief, the show was canceled in 1970, and she took a break for a time to concentrate on being a wife and mother.
Moved into Film
Field appeared in the occasional made-for-television movie, but financial pressure from her husband, a carpenter, compelled her to return to work on a more permanent basis. Once again, she accepted a part she loathed: in The Girl with Something Extra, a 1973 - 74 sitcom, she played a newlywed with psychic powers. Not long afterward, Field divorced, fired her manager, and went back to the Actors Studio. She was eager to move into film, but had a difficult time in the industry, partly because of her high-profile Gidget and Sister Bertrille roles. "It wasn't only that I was typecast or identified with fluffy situation comedy," she explained to Young in her Back Stage West interview. "It was that in those days there was a real stigma between television and film, and no one in film wanted anything to do with anyone who came from television." She finally convinced a director to cast her in Jeff Bridges' film Stay Hungry, in 1976, but ironically she wound up winning the best actress Emmy that year for her additional work in the television movie Sybil. Based on a nonfiction book, the acclaimed project starred Field as a young woman suffering from multiple personality disorder because of childhood abuse.
Field continued to have a tough time landing film roles, and she described this period of her life, during which she was a single mother, as one of the hardest in her life. She recalled in the Good Housekeeping interview with Smith that "I really didn't have any money, and I had two kids and a dream and had no real way of knowing that it would ever happen. I was scared." A romance with one of Hollywood's biggest stars of the era, heartthrob Burt Reynolds, began when she appeared in one of Reynolds's Smokey and the Bandit films, and the relationship lasted through five years and a few more movies. In the end, intense media scrutiny doomed the relationship, but years later Reynolds often told interviewers that the break-up was the biggest regret of his life.
Two Oscars
Field's sixth movie role gave her the first Oscar nomination of her career: the 1979 drama Norma Rae. Here she was cast as an unlikely hero, the scrappy, reluctant union organizer of a small textile mill. In one scene, Field's character shuts off her noisy machine, writes the word "union" on a card, and holds it aloft. One by one, the other workers also turn off their machines in the stirring, three-minute sequence. "It may be the most powerful act of wordless suasion in film: testimony to the fact that in leadership, oratory isn't everything," noted a writer for Inc. Field won several best-actress honors for her work in Norma Rae and beat out Jane Fonda and Bette Midler for the Academy Award that year.
Field went on to appear in a number of other major Hollywood films of the 1980s, often cast as a plucky fighter who triumphs over sadness and hardship. She won her second Oscar for best actress for 1984's Places in the Heart, a 1930s Texas back-country drama. She was cast in the lead as Edna, a woman whose sheriff husband is slain and then must struggle to save the family farm. New York Times critic Vincent Canby claimed her character is "beautifully played," and went on to note that Field excels in the part of a woman "whose growth, in the course of the film, reflects an almost 19th-century faith in the possibilities of the American system, not as the system was, but as one wanted to believe it to be."
Infamous Speech
The following March, Field delivered what would become another career-defining performance: her acceptance speech at the Academy Awards ceremony, which is often misquoted as her gushing, "You like me!" What she actually enthused that night, according to Entertainment Weekly, was: "The first time, I didn't feel it, but this time I feel it and I can't deny the fact that you like me! Right now, you like me!" Other roles that came her way in the 1980s included Murphy's Romance, playing opposite James Garner, and Steel Magnolias, in which she played the mother of newcomer Julia Roberts.
In 1991 Field played a diva-like daytime television star in Soapdish, and took on another everywoman-heroine role in Not without My Daughter, based on the true story of a woman who was forced to smuggle her daughter out of Iran in the early 1980s when her native-born husband refused to let the child return to the United States. She was cast as the soon-to-be ex-wife of Robin Williams's character in 1993's Mrs. Doubtfire, playing a woman who does not realize her husband has disguised himself as an elderly female housekeeper in order to spend more time with their children. She was also the oft-quoted "Mama" in Forrest Gump, the surprise hit of 1994.
For a time, Field ran her own production company in the hopes of finding better film projects for herself. She produced the 1991 Julia Roberts tearjerker Dying Young, and both produced and starred in the 1995 mini-series A Woman of Independent Means, which was nominated for two Emmys. Critics mostly assailed her first action-hero role, which came in John Schlesinger's 1996 film Eye for an Eye. Field plays a woman whose daughter is murdered and vows to avenge the death when the killer, played by Kiefer Sutherland, goes free on a legal technicality.
Made Directorial Debut
Field was teaching workshops at the invitation of Robert Redford at his Sundance Institute in Utah when she began to explore the possibility of directing. She wrote a teleplay for a holiday fable, The Christmas Tree, starring Julie Harris, and her friend Tom Hanks hired her to helm the camera for an episode of his HBO series, From the Earth to the Moon. In 2000 she directed the independent film Beautiful, which features Minnie Driver as a ruthless beauty pageant contestant determined to win America's top crown. Field went back to television when she was offered a small role on the hit drama ER in 2000 and proved so popular as the manic-depressive mother of a series regular that she came back the following season and won an Emmy for her performance. In 2003 Field appeared as a Washington politician who hires Reese Witherspoon's Elle Woods in the popular comedy Legally Blonde 2. A much-touted television series which had the veteran actress playing a U.S. Supreme Court justice earned mixed reviews and was not renewed.
Field finally made it onto the New York stage in the fall of 2002, when producers cast her in The Goat; or, Who Is Sylvia? The Edward Albee-penned drama centered around an architect who falls in love with his goat, with Field playing his baffled, angry wife. She earned glowing reviews for her performance. Writing in Variety, Isherwood noted that Mercedes Ruehl originated the part and had done well, but "Field's touches the heart in a way that brings a new emotional ballast to Stevie's dilemma, and a new emotional equilibrium to the play."
Social-Phobia Sufferer
Field's two sons from her first marriage are grown: Peter Craig is a novelist, while Field's other son has become the third generation in his family to work as an actor. She also has a younger son from her second marriage, with whom she lives in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles. Despite the posh ZIP code, Field eschews the Hollywood party scene. It was her producer husband's love of socializing that ended her second marriage, she told People writer Gregory Cerio. "He wanted to go out, to be with people or go to parties," she confessed. "I couldn't take it. I'd have an anxiety attack."
Like many female actresses of her generation, Field maintains that finding mature roles is not an easy task, but she remains sanguine about her years in Hollywood. As she told Smith in the Good Housekeeping interview, "I want to be able to look back on my life and my career in the motion picture industry, and say: I'm proud of the work, and I had some significance. I represented women of my generation. I was lucky enough to be part of films that in some way represented me."
Books
International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, Volume 3: Actors and Actresses, St. James Press, 1996.
Periodicals
Back Stage West, September 14, 2000.
Entertainment Weekly, November 26, 1993; February 17, 1995; September 22, 2000.
Good Housekeeping, March, 1996; October, 1998; June 2001.
Inc., March 2000.
National Review, December 14, 1984.
New Statesman, June 21, 1996.
New York Post, October 2, 2002.
New York Times, September 21, 1984; July 6, 1994; November 4, 2002; July 2, 2003.
People, October 15, 1984; October 17, 1988; July 8, 1991; January 29, 1996; November 27, 2000.
Time, December 24, 1984; November 20, 1989; August 1, 1994.
Variety, October 14, 2002.
