Sally Field
Sally Field is an actor, born 1946.
Sally Field started at the bottom of the reputational ladder and climbed the entire thing. She was Gidget at eighteen, then The Flying Nun for three seasons, a show so silly it trailed her for a decade, then The Girl with Something Extra. Nobody in 1970 would have called her a serious actress. Sybil (1976) ended that argument inside a single television film and won her an Emmy.
Her gift is a kind of unarmoured directness. Field does not signal a feeling in advance; it arrives already at full strength and she plays the character trying to manage it. That is why her two Academy Awards went to working women rather than tragic heroines: the mill hand organising her factory in Norma Rae and the widow refusing to lose the farm in Places in the Heart. It is also why the graveside scene in Steel Magnolias survives writing that would have sunk almost anyone else.
The comic register is underrated and it kept her employed. She is Burt Reynolds' runaway bride in Smokey and the Bandit, the soap star in Soapdish, and the exasperated ex-wife in Mrs. Doubtfire who is the only thing anchoring that film to earth. Mrs. Gump in Forrest Gump is a handful of scenes with an outsized afterlife.
Six decades on she holds two Oscars, three Primetime Emmys, a Cannes best actress prize, the National Medal of Arts, a Kennedy Center Honor and a Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award from 2023. The late work is the good stuff: Mary Todd Lincoln in Lincoln, the hungry and humiliating comedy of Hello, My Name Is Doris, and an Emmy-winning run on Brothers and Sisters.
Movies (45)
- Remarkably Bright Creatures (2026)
- Forrest Gump (1994)
- The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)
- The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014)
- Mrs. Doubtfire (1993)
- Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde (2003)
- Lincoln (2012)
- Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey (1993)
- Not Without My Daughter (1991)
- Smokey and the Bandit (1977)
- Steel Magnolias (1989)
- Eye for an Eye (1996)
- Where the Heart Is (2000)
- Places in the Heart (1984)
- Marty, Life Is Short (2026)
- The Way West (1967)
- 80 for Brady (2023)
- Homeward Bound II: Lost in San Francisco (1996)
- Stay Hungry (1976)
- Smokey and the Bandit II (1980)
- Spielberg (2017)
- Norma Rae (1979)
- Soapdish (1991)
- Little Evil (2017)
- Absence of Malice (1981)
- The End (1978)
- Spoiler Alert (2022)
- Hooper (1978)
- Rite of Passage: The Amazing Spider-Man Reborn (2012)
- Hello, My Name Is Doris (2015)
TV (16)
- Brothers and Sisters (2006)
- Alias Smith and Jones (1971)
- Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty (2022)
- Finding Your Roots (2012)
- The Flying Nun (1967)
- Maniac (2018)
- Gidget (1965)
- Hollywood Squares (1966)
- Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis (2008)
- The Directors (1999)
- The Last Movie Stars (2022)
- The Dating Game (1965)
- AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movies (1998)
- Dispatches from Elsewhere (2020)
- Sybil (1976)
- The Court (2002)
Books (1)
Where to start with Sally Field
Norma Rae first, without hesitation. It is the performance the Academy Award was for and it holds up completely, because the film refuses to make her likeable before it makes her right. Follow it with Places in the Heart, which is quieter and harder, and then Sybil if you want to see the exact moment the industry had to change its mind about her.
For the popular Field, Steel Magnolias and Mrs. Doubtfire are the two everyone has seen, and both are better than their reputations as weepies and comedies respectively. Smokey and the Bandit is the 1970s star vehicle and is charming on its own terms. Save Hello, My Name Is Doris for later: it is a late-career part with real cruelty in it, and she plays the loneliness without asking you to forgive it. Lincoln rounds it out.
The Oscar years
Two Oscars in five years and an Emmy before that, all in roles about women being underestimated. Norma Rae is the great one, and Sybil is the television film that proved she could act at all after the sitcom years.
The comedies and crowd-pleasers
The films most people have actually seen. Steel Magnolias is the one that gets quoted, Mrs. Doubtfire is the biggest, and Smokey and the Bandit is where the seventies career took a turn nobody planned.
The later work
The long second half. Lincoln got her another Oscar nomination at sixty-six, Doris is the lead she went looking for, and Brothers and Sisters was five seasons of prestige network television.