STUCK ON ADORABLE
‘The roles I cared about deeply I had to fight for,’ actress Sally Field says
PHILADELPHIA Sally Field has a mountain — an entire Alp — of acting hardware and years of experience in the business. Yet Steven Spielberg was about to prevent her Mary Todd Lincoln from happening.
Field was originally cast in the role. When Liam Neeson dropped out of Lincoln and Daniel Day-lewis replaced him, Field recalls Spielberg telling her another actress would be cast as Mary. She knew it was not merely her age — she is a decade older than Day- Lewis; Mary was almost a decade younger than the president. But there was also “the baggage I come with.”
The baggage: Gidget, that nun, B-movie trucker flotsam, Burt Reynolds, the Oscar speech (No. 2).
But when she wants something, Field is 98 pounds of pure will. The actress, among this year’s recipients of the Kennedy Center Honors, informed the most bankable director of all time — mind you, a man she had never worked with — “Steven, I’m telling you right now, this is mine and if you disagree, then, with all due respect, you’re wrong.”
Field, Forrest Gump’s mother, Mrs. Doubtfire’s boss, the least steely of the Steel Magnolias, the core of Places in the Heart, the mother of Brothers & Sisters, the inimitable Norma Rae and 16 deviations of Sybil, the winner of two Oscars, three Emmys and two Golden Globes, volunteered to do a screen test — two actually, though performers of her calibre are long past such exercises. And, c’mon, Field has always looked preposterously young for her age.
“I knew Mary was mine because of her physicality, because of her emotionality, because of her Americanness,” Field says, while shooting the AMC limited series Dispatches From Elsewhere. “I could not think of another actor who had all of those qualities and at the age she was then. By the time we meet Mary, she’s worn.”
Field was right to battle for the role. Her Mary is an exquisitely shaded portrait of grief, entitlement and mettle. And she holds her own with Day-lewis, the Olivier of our time, and earned herself an Oscar nomination.
It says everything about Field, 73, that she shares this story often — in her intimate 2018 memoir, In Pieces (fittingly, she appears almost naked on the cover), in a lengthy interview and in a packed auditorium at the Free Library of Philadelphia. It is a narrative of her tenacity and pluck (such a Fieldian term), how she still battles for respect and roles despite incontrovertible evidence of her abilities, and that the work — and the relentless quest for that work — remains paramount.
“The roles I cared about deeply I had to fight for,” she told the library audience in November. “They never really came to me.”
Director Martin Ritt envisioned Field as textile worker and future GIF Norma Rae. Yet the part was first offered to four or five other actresses.
“No one else wants you,” the late director told her, meaning the suits at 20th Century Fox. Field responded: “That’s always been the case.” The role netted her the first Oscar.
Field has been underestimated her entire career: by producers, directors, audiences. She remains A-list adjacent. Possibly, it is due to the Southern Californian’s approachable, all-american good looks — you don’t cast Field as a Mitteleuropa countess — and her Polly Pocket size. “Everyone is taller than Sally,” notes Julia Roberts, who towers over her Magnolias mother. For years, industry expectations of Field were stuck on “adorable.”
But Hollywood’s resistance to her protean talents proved a gift, igniting her ambition, making her more tenacious, industrious and brash. A half-century in the industry, Field is still a scrapper. She coasts on nothing.
She was too cute, too chipper and emanated too much telegenic gee-whiz gumption to be taken seriously, first as surfette Gidget (which lasted all of one season but flourished in reruns and as pop culture dross) and then as The Flying Nun, drowning in a starched white hood with the wingspan of a Cessna.
She had discovered acting in junior high. An indifferent student, she became queen of the drama department. Now, TV threatened to trap her.
Field loved Gidget and loathed the nun (“meaningless twaddle”). Airborne, she was sunk. This was the ’60s, long before prestige TV, when sitcoms were a cathode raytube prison, “the small screen” a slap. Movies celebrated Actors, not Gidgets.
“They were so not interested in me because they were so sure they knew everything that I was. Part of me had to choose optimism over defeat,” Field says. She has a tendency to look off in the distance as she speaks, as though she’s too determined to give the best answer to be distracted. “I had to say to myself that when I was good enough something would happen, that it would simply change.”
The nun drove Field to the Actors Studio. At her first reading for Lee Strasberg, the famously withholding coach, he said “You were quite brilliant,” something he told precisely no one. With time, and the 1976 television breakthrough of the acting decathlon Sybil, Field was cast as a series of determined, unsung southern women, drawing on the indomitable women in her family.
In the deep-fried froth of Magnolias, Field appears to be in an entirely different movie. While the other women parlay in Grade-a sass, she’s charged with the damn-the-torpedoes graveyard scene, she says, “the heart of the movie where you have to disembowel yourself.”
Field’s actress mother was a beauty, a bit player. Field’s towering stuntman stepfather, Jock Mahoney, played Tarzan after the franchise lost steam and, she says, sexually abused her. The memoir is a love letter and an act of forgiveness to her mother, who died in 2011. “I didn’t really write it for anyone but myself,” she says.
Field’s two marriages, the first to her high school sweetheart, produced three sons, but were largely unhappy. Reynolds, her sole supermarket-checkout paramour, she writes, was jealous and controlling, determined to shrink her back to Gidget. When she was nominated for an Emmy, he scoffed, “Go if you want, but be prepared to lose again.”
She was, then watched as her name was announced for Sybil from the stiff sofa in a rental condo, the sound turned down so as not to disturb Reynolds.
In recent years, Field ventured onto the stage. The reviews, in Edward Albee’s The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? on Broadway, in Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie at the Kennedy Center and later on Broadway, and Arthur Miller’s All My Sons earlier this year in the West End, were rapturous — critics, yet again, were astonished at Field’s ability.
They should have known.
The Washington Post