Sally Field

• 1. Introduction

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  Sally Field is an American actress whose 1984 Academy Award speech has never stopped being quoted. At the podium she said, "And I can't deny the fact that you like me...right now...you like me!" People often remember it as "You like me, you really like me!" but that is a misquotation. Some viewers heard the speech as earnest. Others found it excessive and parodied it. Field eventually delivered the line again, on purpose and for laughs, in a Charles Schwab commercial. A moment that exposed, and then was turned into a joke by, its own speaker raises real questions. How did she come to stand at that podium? What did she do with the attention that followed? And what did her life away from the cameras ask of her?

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• 2. Pasadena Childhood

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  Sally Margaret Field was born on the 6th of November 1946 in Pasadena, California, a suburb of Los Angeles. Her mother, Margaret Field, was an actress. Her father, Richard Dryden Field, was a pharmacist who served in the Army during World War II. Her brother, Richard Dryden Field Jr., became a physicist and academic. Her ancestry includes English and Irish roots.

  In 1950 her parents divorced. On the 21st of January 1952, in Tijuana, Mexico, her mother married Jock Mahoney, an actor and stuntman. In her 2018 memoir, Field said that Mahoney sexually abused her throughout her childhood, until she was 14.

  Portola Middle School came first, and then Birmingham High School in Van Nuys, where Field was a cheerleader. Her class of 1964 included the financier Michael Milken and the talent agent Michael Ovitz. The actress Cindy Williams was one year behind her.

  In that same memoir, In Pieces, Field wrote that she suffered from "severe depression" in her late teens. Acting classes helped her work through what she called "this urgency, this anxiety, this need to find something that was festering in me." Her mother had been an actress, and now acting had become Field's own way forward.

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• 3. Typecast and Breaking Free

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  Gidget, which aired on ABC in 1965 and 1966, cast Field as a boy-crazy surfer girl. The show was not an immediate success, and the network cancelled it after a single season. Summer reruns then earned respectable ratings, and the series became a belated hit.

  ABC next built a vehicle around her called The Flying Nun. From 1967 to 1970, across three seasons, she played Sister Bertrille. In an interview on the Season One DVD release, Field said she thoroughly enjoyed Gidget but hated The Flying Nun. The directors, she said, did not treat her with respect.

  During those years she also had a brief singing career. Her 1967 album, Star of The Flying Nun, reached No. 172 on the Billboard 200 that December. The single "Felicidad" reached No. 94 on Billboard and No. 91 on Cashbox. A 1968 single, "Gonna Build a Mountain," also featured her Flying Nun co-stars Madeleine Sherwood and Marge Redmond.

  After the nun, Field was typecast, and respectable roles were hard to find. In 1971 she starred in the ABC television film Maybe I'll Come Home in the Spring. She played a discouraged teen runaway who returns home with a bearded, drug-abusing hippie, played by David Carradine. Guest parts followed through the mid-1970s, including the Western Alias Smith and Jones. That series starred Pete Duel, her former Gidget co-star. She also appeared in the Night Gallery episode "Whisper."

  The Girl with Something Extra, a series that aired from 1973 to 1974, put her opposite John Davidson. When it was cancelled, Field studied at the Actors Studio under Lee Strasberg. Strasberg became her mentor and helped her move past her girl-next-door television image.

  Soon after, she won the title role in the 1976 television film Sybil, based on the book by Flora Rheta Schreiber. She played a young woman with dissociative identity disorder. The performance earned her an Emmy Award in 1977, for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Special Program in drama or comedy. It also let her break out of her sitcom typecasting. Stay Hungry, a 1976 film that also featured Arnold Schwarzenegger, brought her further strong reviews opposite Jeff Bridges.

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• 4. Oscar Years

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  Smokey and the Bandit, released in 1977, paired Field with Burt Reynolds, Jackie Gleason and Jerry Reed. It was the second-highest-grossing film of that year.

  Her relationship with Reynolds ran from 1976 to 1980. In that time they co-starred in four films together: Smokey and the Bandit, Smokey and the Bandit II, The End and Hooper. After their 1980 breakup they continued to date on and off until they split for good in 1982.

  In 1979 Field played the title role of a union organizer in Norma Rae, the film that established her as a dramatic actress. Vincent Canby, reviewing it for The New York Times, wrote: "Norma Rae is a seriously concerned contemporary drama, illuminated by some very good performances and one, Miss Field's, that is spectacular." She won the Best Female Performance Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. She also won the Best Actress Academy Award, presented at the 52nd Academy Awards.

  Back Roads, in 1981, showed her changing her image again. She played a foul-mouthed prostitute opposite Tommy Lee Jones in a film set in the South. Golden Globe nominations followed for the 1981 drama Absence of Malice and the 1982 comedy Kiss Me Goodbye.

  In the 1984 drama Places in the Heart, Field starred as Edna Spalding, a farm widow struggling through the Great Depression. The role won her a second Golden Globe and a second Oscar, awarded at the 57th Academy Awards.

  Murphy's Romance, a 1985 romantic comedy, co-starred her with James Garner. In March 1986 Field was on the cover of Playboy, wearing the classic leotard and bunny ears. She was only the interview subject and did not appear in any pictorial. That same year she received the Women in Film Crystal Award.

  The role of M'Lynn, the matriarch in Steel Magnolias in 1989, earned her a nomination for the 1990 Golden Globe for Best Actress.

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• 5. Mothers and Matriarchs

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  In 1993, Disney's live-action Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey had Field voice the character Sassy. That year, in Mrs. Doubtfire, she played the wife of Robin Williams's character and the love interest of Pierce Brosnan's.

  Forrest Gump, in 1994, cast her as Tom Hanks's mother, although she was only ten years older than he was. The two had co-starred six years earlier in Punchline. Her work in Forrest Gump brought BAFTA and Screen Actors Guild nominations.

  Not Without My Daughter was a controversial thriller based on Betty Mahmoody's real-life escape from Iran with her daughter Mahtob. Soapdish was a comedy in which Field played a pampered soap-opera star. Her castmates included Kevin Kline, Whoopi Goldberg, Cathy Moriarty, Elisabeth Shue and Robert Downey Jr.

  In 1996 she reprised Sassy in Homeward Bound 2: Lost in San Francisco. Later that year the 46th Berlin International Film Festival gave her the Berlinale Camera award. It honored her role as a grieving vigilante mother in Eye for an Eye, directed by John Schlesinger. In 1997 she guest starred on King of the Hill, voicing Junie Harper in the episode "Hilloween." Junie is a religious woman who battles Hank Hill, voiced by Mike Judge, to ban Halloween. In 2000 she co-starred with Natalie Portman in Where the Heart Is. She also appeared opposite Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde.

  On ER, during the 2000-2001 season, Field played Maggie, the mother of Dr. Abby Lockhart. Maggie has bipolar disorder, and the role won Field an Emmy Award in 2001. She came back to the part in 2003 and again in 2006. In 2002 she starred in the series The Court.

  The Christmas Tree, a 1996 television film, began her directing career. In 1998 she directed the episode "The Original Wives' Club" of the miniseries From the Earth to the Moon. She also played a minor part in it as Trudy, the wife of astronaut Gordon Cooper. In 2000 she directed the feature film Beautiful.

  Brothers & Sisters debuted on ABC in September 2006 with another actress in the pivotal part. In the pilot, Betty Buckley played the matriarch Nora Walker. The producers then decided to take the character in a new direction and offered the role to Field. Nora's adult daughters on screen were played by Calista Flockhart and Rachel Griffiths.

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• 6. Lincoln and the Stage

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  In Steven Spielberg's 2012 film Lincoln, Field played Mary Todd Lincoln. The widely praised performance brought Best Supporting Actress nominations at the Oscars, Golden Globes, BAFTA, Screen Actors Guild and Critics' Choice awards. The Oscar nomination came at the 85th Academy Awards.

  Aunt May in The Amazing Spider-Man, also in 2012, was her entry into the Marvel Comics films. She played the part again in the 2014 sequel.

  In January 2015 it was announced that Field would co-host on TCM. That same year she played the title character in Hello, My Name Is Doris. The role earned a Critics' Choice Movie Award nomination for Best Actress in a Comedy.

  On Broadway in 2017, Field reprised Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie at the Belasco Theatre. She had first played the role in a 2004 Kennedy Center production. Previews began on the 7th of February 2017, and the show officially opened on the 9th of March. It closed on the 21st of May after 85 performances and 31 previews. The Tony Award nomination for Best Actress in a Play was hers for the performance.

  Grand Central Publishing released her memoir, In Pieces, in September 2018. That year Field also returned to episodic television in the Netflix miniseries Maniac. In 2020 she starred in the AMC series Dispatches from Elsewhere.

  In 2023 she co-starred in the comedy 80 for Brady. The cast included the NFL quarterback Tom Brady and the actresses Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Rita Moreno.

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• 7. Voice and Causes

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  At the 2007 Emmy Awards, Field won Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series for Brothers & Sisters. In her acceptance speech she said: "If the mothers ruled the world, there would be no goddamn wars in the first place." Fox, which aired the ceremony, cut the sound and picture after the word "god." It did not return to the stage until she had finished speaking. A statement the next day, covering this and two other cuts that night, said that "some language during the live broadcast may have been considered inappropriate by some viewers."

  Field has been a strong advocate for women's rights. She has said that at seventeen she had an illegal abortion in Mexico and was molested by a technician during the procedure. She calls it traumatic and is a vocal advocate for abortion rights in the United States.

  She has served on the board of directors of Vital Voices Global Partnership, an international women's NGO. She has co-hosted its Global Leadership Awards six times.

  In 2012 the Human Rights Campaign honored her with its Ally for Equality Award. She is an advocate for LGBT rights, and her youngest son, Samuel Greisman, is gay.

  After an osteoporosis diagnosis in 2005, Field created the "Rally with Sally for Bone Health" campaign. It was supported by Roche and GlaxoSmithKline, whose co-promotion of Boniva, a bisphosphonate treatment, was controversial. The campaign urged early diagnosis through tools such as bone-density scans. In November 2009 she appeared on an episode of The Doctors to talk about osteoporosis and her Rally With Sally Foundation.

  On the 13th of December 2019, Field was arrested in Washington, D.C. She was among protesters at one of Jane Fonda's Fire Drill Fridays climate change demonstrations.

  A Democrat, Field backed Hillary Clinton's bid for the party's 2008 presidential nomination. More recently she supported Kamala Harris's 2024 presidential campaign.

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• 8. Family and Honors

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  Field was married to Steven Craig from 1968 to 1975, although the couple separated in 1973. They had two sons. Peter Craig, born in 1969, became a novelist and screenwriter. Eli Craig, born in 1972, became an actor and director.

  In 1984 she married her second husband, Alan Greisman. They had one son, born in 1987, and divorced in 1994.

  On the 29th of October 1988, Field and three members of her family were aboard a private plane at Aspen/Pitkin County Airport in Colorado. The plane belonged to the media mogul Merv Griffin. It lost power and rejected takeoff, then slammed into a parked aircraft. Everyone survived with minor injuries.

  In 2005 the American Academy of Achievement gave her its Golden Plate Award. It recognized her lifetime of contributions to the arts and her dedication as a social activist. On the 5th of May 2014 she received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, in front of the Hollywood Wax Museum. The same year she received the National Medal of Arts, and in 2019 she received the Kennedy Center Honor.

  Her full tally of recognition runs long. She has two BAFTA nominations and nine Primetime Emmy nominations, with three wins. She has eleven Golden Globe nominations, with two wins, and one Tony Award nomination. She has two Critics' Choice Movie Award nominations and one Cannes Film Festival Best Actress prize. Among nine competitive Actor Awards nominations she has one win.

  In 2023 Field was named the 58th recipient of the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award. It was presented at the 29th Screen Actors Guild Awards.

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