Sally Field is a famous actress known for her roles in “Forrest Gump,” “Brothers and Sisters,” “Lincoln,” and “Steel Magnolias.” She has won Academy, Emmy, and Golden Globe Awards. The 76-year-old actress started her career playing the main role in “Gidget” in 1965. Since then, she has appeared in many TV shows, movies, and Broadway plays. Sally has also spoken openly about her personal challenges. In her 2018 memoir “In Pieces,” she talks about being sexually abused by her stepfather and her struggles with depression, self-doubt, and loneliness.
Sally Field was born in Pasadena, California, on November 6, 1946. Her father, Richard Dryden Field, was a salesman, and her mother, Margaret Field, was an actress. After her parents divorced, her mother married actor and stuntman Jock Mahoney. Sally has a brother named Richard Field and a half-sister named Princess O’Mahoney.
Sally Field married Steven Craig in 1968, and they had two sons, Peter and Eli. They divorced in 1975. In 1984, she married Alan Greisman, and they had a son named Samuel. They divorced in 1994. From 1976 to 1980, she dated Burt Reynolds, a relationship she talks about in her memoir. She describes how he was controlling, even convincing her not to attend the Emmy ceremony where she won for “Sybil.” Reynolds died just before her book was released. In his own memoir, he called their failed relationship “the biggest regret of my life.”
Field mentioned they hadn’t spoken for 30 years before Reynolds passed away. She explained, “He was not someone I could be around. He was just not good for me in any way. He had somehow invented that I was more important to him than he had thought, but I wasn’t. He just wanted what he didn’t have. I just didn’t want to deal with that.”
Looking back, Field saw connections between her relationship with Reynolds, which she described as “confusing and complicated, and not without loving and caring, but really complicated and hurtful to me,” and her relationship with her stepfather. In her memoir, she talks about her stepfather’s abuse when he would call her to his room when she was 14. She wrote, “I felt both a child, helpless, and not a child. Powerful. This was power. And I owned it. But I wanted to be a child — and yet.”
Field later found out that her mother knew about the abuse but believed her husband when he lied and said it happened only once when he was drunk. Field told her it was “all through my childhood.” She wrote the memoir after her mother died to try to understand and forgive her. “It was the only way I was going to find the pieces of my mother that I couldn’t put together. And until I could see that, I couldn’t forgive her, and I needed to forgive her or at least understand her. So I wrote the book to forgive her.”
These days, Sally Field keeps her Oscars and Emmys in a TV room where she plays video games with her grandkids. She shows no signs of retiring, with her film “Spoiler Alert” releasing next week and “80 for Brady” coming in 2023.
“As an actor, she dared this town to typecast her, and then simply broke through every dogmatic barrier to find her own way — not to stardom, which I imagine she’d decry, but to great roles in great films and television,” said Steven Spielberg, her friend and “Lincoln” director. “Through her consistently good taste and feisty persistence, she has survived our ever-changing culture, stood the test of time and earned this singular place in history.”