Sally Field is an Academy, Emmy, and Golden Globe Award-winning actress who has appeared in films such as “Forrest Gump,” “Brothers and Sisters,” “Lincoln,” and “Steel Magnolias.” In 1965, the 76-year-old actress debuted in “Gidget,” playing the title character. She has since appeared in a number of TV episodes, movies, and Broadway productions. Field has also been candid about her personal struggles. In her 2018 memoir “In Pieces,” she discusses her stepfather’s sexual assault as well as her difficulties with despair, self-doubt, and loneliness.
Sally Field was born on November 6, 1946, in Pasadena, California. Her father, Richard Dryden Field, was a businessman, and her mother, Margaret Field (née Morlan), was an actress. Her mother married actor and stuntman Jock Mahoney after her parents separated. Sally has a brother named Richard Field, as well as a half-sister named Princess O’Mahoney.
In “Gidget,” she played Frances Elizabeth ‘Gidget’ Lawrence for the first time. However, due to low ratings, the show was terminated after one season. She later starred in “The Flying Nun,” which aired for three seasons. She apparently despised working on the show and was suffering from depression at the time. “…I just had to put my head down, go to work, and do the best job I could,” she explained. “And those are the times when you understand there’s a reason you’re eating so much but hiding it. You’re attempting to conceal your depression. But at the time, I didn’t have the abilities to recognize what was occurring to me…or to see what my dreams were.” [2]
In 1967, she made her cinematic debut in “The Way West.” Then, in 1977, she co-starred in the box office smash “Smokey and the Bandit” with her lover at the time, Burt Reynolds. She won her first Academy Award for her performance in “Norma Rae” in 1979. Her second Academy Award came in 1984 for “Places in the Heart.” She starred as the mother in the Academy Award-winning picture “Forrest Gump” in 1994.
In 1968, Sally Field married Steven Craig, with whom she had two boys, Peter and Eli. They divorced in 1975, and she afterwards married Alan Greisman. Before divorcing in 1994, they had one son, Samuel. She dated Burt Reynolds from 1976 until 1980, a tumultuous relationship that she recalls in her memoir. She describes his domineering conduct and how he persuaded Field not to attend the Emmy event when she was honored for “Sybil.” Reynolds died immediately before the publication of her book, and in his 2015 memoir “But Enough About Me,” he termed their failed romance “the worst regret of my life.” [3]
Meanwhile, Fields stated that they hadn’t communicated in 30 years before his death. “He wasn’t someone I could hang out with,” she explained. “He was simply not right for me in any way. And in his reassessment of everything, he had somehow fabricated that I was more essential to him than he had assumed, but I wasn’t. He simply desired what he did not possess. I simply did not want to deal with it.”
In retrospect, Field saw parallels between her relationship with Reynolds — which she described as “confusing and convoluted, and not without kind and caring, but incredibly complicated and upsetting to me” — and her stepfather. She also discusses her stepfather’s abuse in her memoir, describing how he would routinely summon her to his room when she was 14 years old. “I felt like a child who was both powerless and not a child,” she wrote. “Powerful. This was strength. And I was the one who possessed it. But I desperately wanted to be a child — and yet.”
Field later discovered that her mother had known about the abuse the entire time, but her husband had lied and claimed it had only happened once when he was inebriated. Field informed her that had been “all through my childhood,” and she wrote the memoir after her mother died. “It was the only way I was going to locate the missing pieces of my mother. And I couldn’t forgive her until I saw that, and I needed to forgive her or at least understand her. So I wrote the novel to make amends with her.”
