Sally Field, the actress who fought abuse and escaped her demons through acting

Sally Field, 79, is a discreet, subtle person. It’s not that she’s delicate, or quiet. She’s a woman who, after 60 years in the entertainment industry, knows what to say, and how and when to say it. Turning 80 in November, Field doesn’t seek approval. That’s why when she went on stage at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles last Monday to collect her fourth Emmy, making history as the oldest winner in her category — best actress in a miniseries or television movie, for Remarkably Bright Creatures — she knew exactly what to say. She thanked the producers, Netflix, and Canada. “Blessed Canada! Our neighbors, our friends,” she said of America’s neighbor. The allusion to the country where her movie was filmed and which now has a tense relationship with the U.S. prompted enthusiastic applause from the audience. “We are the Arts. We matter, our voices matter, our diversity, our unique storytelling matters,” she continued. “We can’t let those voices be silenced or compromised.”

A winner of two Oscars and two Golden Globes, Field has clearly embraced her role as a pillar of the industry and a voice of her community, one in which she feels recognized, to which she finally belongs, and where she can raise her voice for the causes in which she believes. It has taken her years, but in a subtle way, she has achieved much, despite the obstacles she has encountered along the way.

The mother of three sons — all of whom are successful in the industry — Field was raised among women in Pasadena, a charming city north of Los Angeles. She was three years old when her parents divorced, and she and her older brother went to live with their mother, grandmother, great-aunt, and great-grandmother. As she has said in interviews and also in her memoir, In Pieces, published in 2018, her life was built on a matriarchy, and men were gradually introduced.

The first man to have an impact on her life was, of course, her father. When he died, she was shooting Mrs. Doubtfire, one of the films that would redefine her career in the 1990s. Her co-star, Robin Williams, who played her ex-husband, sensed something was wrong when she arrived on set. When she told him that her father had just died, Williams demanded that the shoot be reorganized so that she could be with her family. As she said in Vanity Fair, “I could go back to my house, call my brother and make arrangements. It’s a side of Robin that people rarely knew: He was very sensitive and intuitive.”

In the absence of her biological father, Field gained a stepfather. Her mother, a stunning actress named Margaret Field who nailed only minor roles, married a stuntman, Jock Mahoney. Mahoney abused Field constantly, until the age of 14. Only when her mother was very old did Field have the courage to tell her. She later went public with the abuse in her memoirs, which took over seven years to write, according to The New York Times. While she did not justify Mahoney’s crimes, like so many victims of child sexual abuse, she said that he never hurt her: “He never invaded me. In all the many times. Not really. It would have been one thing if he had held me down and raped me, hurt me. Made me bleed. But he didn’t. Was that love? Was that because he loved me?” she wrote.

When Field reached adolescence in the early 1960s, her stepfather stopped the abuse. But others would pick up the slack. At 17, in 1964, she became pregnant and decided to have an abortion, which was illegal at the time in the U.S. She traveled 185 miles to the border with Mexico and had the operation in Tijuana. It was a “hideous” experience, performed without anesthesia and with the technician “molesting” her in the process. In a 2024 Instagram video aimed at drumming up support for Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, Field said she still feels “very shamed” about the abortion “because I was raised in the 50s, and it’s ingrained in me.” The video ends with Field urging: “PLEASE. WE CAN’T GO BACK!!”

Just a few months later, Field became one of America’s sweethearts in Gidget, a TV comedy that was not entirely successful, but helped her make the leap to her first big role as Sister Bertrille in The Flying Nun, in 1967, for which she even recorded an album. Subsequently, she felt typecast and decided to study with Lee Strasberg at the famous Actors Studio in Los Angeles and in the mid-1970s she began to get the kind of roles in dramas that she craved. As she has said, acting was her escape route from pain.

At just 30, she had one divorce behind her. She had married Steven Craig in 1968 at just 19. They had two sons: Peter, screenwriter of Gladiator II and Top Gun: Maverick, and Eli, director of cult horror films. By the time she and Craig cordially separated, she had already experienced two other episodes of abuse. In 1968, singer and lyricist Jimmy Webb pounced on her after smoking pot together. Field writes that she doesn’t believe Webb acted with “malicious intent — I felt he was stoned out of his mind.” In 1976, director Bob Rafelson told her, after a casting: “I can’t hire anyone who doesn’t kiss good enough.” “So I kissed him. It must have been good enough,” she writes in her memoir.

In an email to The New York Times, Webb addressed Field’s allegations, describing the incident as typical of the era. “I have great memories of our times together and great respect for Sally — so much respect that I didn’t write about her in my book because I didn’t want to tarnish her Gidget image with our stories of drugs and sex,” he told the Times. Rafelson, on the other hand, claimed that the allegation was “totally false.”

In 1976, Field played a woman with a personality disorder in the series Sybil, a role for which she won her first Emmy. Four years later, she landed a role in the movie Norma Rae, about a single mother who works in a cotton factory, for which she won her first Oscar in 1980. In 1976, she started dating Burt Reynolds, with whom she shot four films over four years. “It was a very complicated relationship,” Field told People magazine. “There were parts of Burt that were so wonderful and lovable, and then there were parts that were really frightening, and he was very much like my stepfather. It doesn’t mean that there wasn’t a part of me that loved Burt to pieces, but then I loved my stepfather too.”

Reynolds apparently always hoped that his career would eclipse Field’s. “It was the beginning of me pulling away when he didn’t want me to do Norma Rae, called her [Norma Rae] a whore, and it was because she had some sexual past. He threw the script at me,” Field told People magazine. “He wanted to control me, and because I was standing up, he said, ‘Boy, you’re letting this get the better of you.’ And I said, ‘This is the better of me.’ And I went and I met with [director] Marty Ritt. I did the film. But it was the beginning of me finding my legs.”

Subsequently, Reynolds opposed Field traveling to Cannes to promote Norma Rae and prior to the Oscar ceremony he refused to attend, telling her, “You don’t think you’re going to win anything, do you?” She did.

There followed other triumphs, such as Places in the Heart, for which won her second Oscar in 1985; Steel Magnolias, alongside Dolly Parton and Julia Roberts; Mrs Doubtfire, in 1993; Forrest Gump, playing the mother of Tom Hanks despite being only 10 years his senior; the controversial Not Without My Daughter; Legally Blonde 2; and the series ER, which won her another Emmy in 2001.

By then, Field had married and divorced again and had another child. In 1984 she married producer Alan Greisman, with whom she had Sam three years later. The couple had an accident on a private plane, together with Field’s mother when Sam was 11 months old. They were returning from Aspen, Colorado, to Los Angeles, when the plane lost altitude. It managed to land, causing only minor injuries to those on board. The divorce, as low-key as the marriage, came in 1988. On the last night of the Emmys, Field’s son Sam was her escort, walking hand in hand with his mother on the blue carpet.

In the last 25 years, Field has not stopped working. Her role as the matriarch in Brothers and Sisters earned her another Emmy, in 2007; that of Aunt May in 2012’s The Amazing Spider-Man and its sequel earned her popularity among younger generations; that of Mary Todd Lincoln with Daniel Day-Lewis in Spielberg’s Lincoln, won her most recent Oscar nomination. She has done miniseries, comedies, theater in New York, has a star on the Walk of Fame and a lifetime achievement award from the Screen Actors Guild. And she has written her memoirs. She has also used her voice publicly for the causes she defends.

Already in the mid-1990s, Field was a voice for feminism in the industry. “The situation in Hollywood for women has been getting better and better since I started 33 years ago,” she told EL PAÍS in an interview in Madrid in 1996. “There have been no giant leaps, but three steps forward and two steps back. Before, at 40, you were lucky if you made one film a year. Now a handful of us work regularly, and I am almost 50. This wasn’t happening before. Before, women were making things up as they went along. With no alternative, we formed our own companies. Goldie Hawn, me, Jessica Lange, Jane Fonda, Barbra Streisand. We all did it. It was innovative and the only way to work. From there, a movement of successful women emerged who are now producers, directors and screenwriters. That’s been a pretty big change. It’s not that we drove it but I was there, fighting alone with all those women.”

In 2004, Field did not hesitate to go to Ciudad Juárez with her good friend Jane Fonda and a handful of artists and writers to protest against the widespread violence against women in the Mexican city. Later, with Fonda, she protested against climate change at the Capitol in Washington in 2019; both ended up arrested, which helped flag up the cause.

Field has been an actress but not exactly a star. But perhaps her trajectory in Hollywood shows what a gift discretion and subtlety can prove to be.

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