The Flying Nun star who became a two-time Best Actress winner
Sally Field hated playing The Flying Nun and spent years typecast as the girl next door. Lessons with Lee Strasberg led to Sybil, then Norma Rae and a first Oscar. At 79 she set another mark, becoming the oldest winner of the Emmy for lead actress in a limited series or television movie.
Field was born in Pasadena on November 6, 1946. Her mother, Margaret Field, acted; her father was a pharmacist who served in the Army in the Second World War. At Birmingham High School in Van Nuys she was a cheerleader, graduating in 1964 alongside the future financier Michael Milken and agent Michael Ovitz.
Television found her first. Gidget, in which she played a surfer girl chasing boys, was cancelled after one season in 1966 but then drew good numbers in summer reruns. ABC built The Flying Nun around her next, casting her as Sister Bertrille from 1967 to 1970. She later said she enjoyed Gidget and loathed the nun show because its directors did not respect her. Afterwards serious parts dried up. Studying at the Actors Studio, where Strasberg became her mentor, helped her shed the sitcom image, and in 1976 she played the title role in Sybil, a woman with dissociative identity disorder, which won her an Emmy in 1977.
Films followed quickly. In 1977 she co-starred with Burt Reynolds in Smokey and the Bandit, the second-biggest earner of that year. Two years later Norma Rae, where she played a union organiser, brought her the Cannes prize for best actress and the Academy Award. Her second Oscar came for Places in the Heart (1984), as a widowed farmer holding on through the Depression. That acceptance speech, with its line about the audience liking her right now, is often misquoted as "you really like me", and she later sent it up herself in a Charles Schwab advertisement.
Oddities pepper the later career. In Forrest Gump she played Tom Hanks's mother though only 10 years older than him. She won an Emmy in 2001 as a bipolar mother on ER, and another in 2007 for the Brothers and Sisters matriarch Nora Walker, a part first played by Betty Buckley in the pilot. Playing Mary Todd Lincoln for Steven Spielberg in 2012 earned an Oscar nomination, and her 2018 memoir, In Pieces, described abuse by her stepfather, the stuntman Jock Mahoney.
Source: Sally Field
