Under contract at Paramount Pictures in the 1940s, she had small roles in such classics as The Big Clock with Ray Milland, the original Carrie with Laurence Olivier, and The Paleface with Bob Hope. Her mother, Margaret Field, was also an actress. She played Nurse/Doctor Maura Tierney's manic mother on ER, a Supreme Court judge on the politically-charged The Court, and the widowed matriarch of Brothers & Sisters with Calista Flockhart. There is little call in movies for aging actresses, even with Oscars, so in recent years Field has returned to television. In some of Field's other roles, she played the eager but naïve reporter in Absence of Malice with Paul Newman, a horse breeder who falls for James Garner in Murphy's Romance, Julia Roberts's mother raging against God in Steel Magnolias, Robin Williams's ex-wife in Mrs Doubtfire, and Tom Hanks's homily-spouting mother in Forest Gump. She won another Oscar as the stubborn Depression-era mom of Places in the Heart with John Malkovich and Danny Glover, and gave a gushing, heartfelt, but profoundly silly acceptance speech - "You like me, right now, you like me!" - that is still parodied. She starred in Smokey and the Bandit and three other movies with boyfriend Burt Reynolds, and won an Oscar as Norma Rae, organizing union workers in a textile mill. In the 1971 TV movie Maybe I'll Come Home in the Spring, she played a hippie girl who leaves her alcoholic parents and crystal meth-addicted kid sister to follow long-haired counterculture freak David Carradine, and in Sybil she gave a virtuoso performance as a schizophrenic - and won an Emmy. In her first movie, made between Gidget's end and The Flying Nun's debut, she played a slutty cowgirl with her legs spread apart in her first scene, in The Way West with Kirk Douglas and Robert Mitchum. The sitcoms left Field with an image as ditzy and innocent, but she yearned to be taken seriously, and almost immediately tried to shake that perky "good girl" image. Field's third sitcom was the mid-1970s dud The Girl with Something Extra, a rip-off of Bewitched where Field could read minds, but kept her talent a secret from her husband ( John Davidson) until their wedding night. The show was lighter than air but Field was adorable, and it featured a teenaged Shelley Morrison as a Puerto Rican nun. Her second sitcom, The Flying Nun, offered Field as a novice nun whose winged headdress provided just the right aerodynamics to lift her off the ground when she tilted her head just so. After high school she was invited to an actors' workshop at Columbia Studios, where she was promptly signed to star as Gidget in a sitcom based on the hit movies of the late 1950s and '60s, with Field taking Sandra Dee's role as the beach babe and Don Porter as her bookish father. Her memoir, In Pieces, was published last September and became an instant New York Times best-seller.Sally Field's mother and stepfather were both actors, and she was usually the star of her school plays. In 2012, Field was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2015, was honored by President Obama with the National Medal of Arts. In March, Field made her West End debut to critical acclaim in Arthur Miller’s All My Sons opposite Bill Pullman at the Old Vic. In 2017, she revisited that role on Broadway and received a Tony® nomination. In 2002, Field made her Broadway debut in Edward Albee’s The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?, and in 2004, appeared as Amanda Wingfield in Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie at the Kennedy Center. She went on to star in The Flying Nun in 1967 and eventually starred in three television series by the age of 25. Her TV roles include Sybil, Brothers & Sisters, and ER,and most recently the Netflix series Maniac.īorn in Pasadena, California, and raised in a show business family, Field began her career in 1964 in the television series Gidget. ![]() Doubtfire Soapdish Not Without My Daughter and Punchline. Highlights from her extensive film credits include Hello, My Name is Doris Lincoln Forrest Gump Steel Magnolias Murphy’s Romance Places in the Heart Absence of Malice Norma Rae Mrs. With a career that has spanned more than five decades, Sally Field is a two-time Academy Award® and three-time Emmy Award®–winning actress, who has portrayed dozens of iconic roles on both large and small screens.
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