Sally Margaret Field (born November 6, 1946) is an American actress. Known for her roles on screen and stage, she has received various accolades including two Academy Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, and four Primetime Emmy Awards, as well as nominations for two British Academy Film Awards and a Tony Award. She was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2014, the National Medal of Arts in 2014, the Kennedy Center Honor in 2019, and the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award in 2023.
She earned two Academy Awards for Best Actress for her portrayals as a union organizer in Norma Rae (1979) and a mother struggling during the Great Depression in Places in the Heart (1984). She was Oscar-nominated for playing Mary Todd Lincoln in Lincoln (2012). She also starred in Smokey and the Bandit (1977), Smokey and the Bandit II (1980), Absence of Malice (1981), Murphy's Romance (1985), Steel Magnolias (1989), Mrs. Doubtfire (1993), and Forrest Gump (1994). She played Aunt May in The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) and its 2014 sequel.
On television, she gained stardom for her television roles in the ABC sitcoms Gidget (1965–1966) and The Flying Nun (1967–1970). She won four Primetime Emmy Awards for her performances in the NBC film Sybil (1976), the NBC medical drama ER (2001), the ABC drama series Brothers & Sisters (2006–2011), and the Netflix film Remarkably Bright Creatures (2026). On stage, she starred in the Broadway revival of the Tennessee Williams play The Glass Menagerie for which she received a nomination for the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play.
Early life and education
Field was born on November 6, 1946, in Pasadena, California, a suburb of Los Angeles. Her mother, Margaret Field (1922–2011), was an actress. Her father, Richard Dryden Field (1914–1993), was a pharmacist who served in the Army during World War II. Her ancestry includes English and Irish. Her brother is Richard Dryden Field Jr., a physicist and academic. Her parents were divorced in 1950; on January 21, 1952, in Tijuana, Mexico, her mother married Jock Mahoney, an actor and stuntman. Field said in her 2018 memoir that she was sexually abused by Mahoney throughout her childhood, up to the age of 14.
As a teen, Field attended Portola Middle School and Birmingham High School in Van Nuys, where she was a cheerleader. Her class of 1964 classmates included financier Michael Milken and talent agent Michael Ovitz, while actress Cindy Williams was a year behind Field.
Field has stated that when she was seventeen she got an illegal abortion in Mexico, and was molested by a technician during the procedure.
Career
1965–1976: Early television roles and Gidget
Field got her start on television as the boy-crazy surfer girl in the sitcom Gidget (ABC, 1965–1966). The show was not an initial success and was cancelled after a single season; however, summer reruns garnered respectable ratings, making the show a belated success. Wanting to find a new starring vehicle for Field, ABC next produced The Flying Nun with Field cast as Sister Bertrille for three seasons, from 1967 to 1970. In an interview included on the Season One DVD release, Field said that she thoroughly enjoyed Gidget but hated The Flying Nun because she was not treated with respect by the show's directors. During her time on The Flying Nun, Field had a brief singing career, recording an album (Star of The Flying Nun, 1967) and a number of singles.
Field was then typecast, finding respectable roles difficult to obtain. In 1971, Field starred in the ABC television film Maybe I'll Come Home in the Spring, playing a discouraged teen runaway who returns home with a bearded, drug-abusing hippie (played by David Carradine). She made several guest television appearances through the mid-1970s, including a role on the Western Alias Smith and Jones, a popular series starring Gidget co-star Pete Duel. She also appeared in the episode "Whisper" on the thriller Night Gallery.
In 1973, Field was cast in a starring role opposite John Davidson in the series The Girl with Something Extra that aired from 1973 to 1974. Following the series' cancellation, Field studied at the Actors Studio with acting teacher Lee Strasberg. Strasberg became a mentor to Field, helping her move past her television image of the girl next door. During this period, Field divorced her first husband in 1975.
Soon after studying with Strasberg, Field landed the title role in the 1976 television film Sybil, based on the book by Flora Rheta Schreiber. Her dramatic portrayal of a young woman afflicted with dissociative identity disorder earned her an Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Special Program – Drama or Comedy in 1977 and enabled her to break through the typecasting of her sitcom work. She received further strong reviews for her work in the 1976 film Stay Hungry, opposite Jeff Bridges and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
1977–1989: Norma Rae and film stardom
In 1977, Field co-starred with Burt Reynolds, Jackie Gleason, and Jerry Reed in the year's second-highest-grossing film, Smokey and the Bandit. In 1979, she played the titular union organizer in Norma Rae, a film that established her as a dramatic actress. Vincent Canby, reviewing the film for The New York Times, wrote: "Norma Rae is a seriously concerned contemporary drama, illuminated by some very good performances and one, Miss Field's, that is spectacular." For her role in Norma Rae, Field won the Best Female Performance Prize at the Cannes Film Festival and the Academy Award for Best Actress.
Field appeared with Reynolds in three more films: The End, Hooper, and Smokey and the Bandit II. In 1981, she continued to change her image, playing a foul-mouthed prostitute opposite Tommy Lee Jones in the South-set film Back Roads. She was nominated for a Golden Globe for the 1981 drama Absence of Malice and the 1982 comedy Kiss Me Goodbye.
In the 1984 drama Places in the Heart, she starred as Edna Spalding, a farm widow struggling to weather the Great Depression. She won her second Golden Globe Award and second Oscar. Field's acceptance speech has since been both admired as earnest and parodied as excessive, mainly the line, "And I can't deny the fact that you like me...right now...you like me! (applause) Thank you!" Field later parodied herself when she delivered the line (often misquoted as "You like me, you really like me!") in a Charles Schwab commercial.
In 1985, she co-starred with James Garner in the romantic comedy Murphy's Romance. The following year, Field appeared on the cover of the March 1986 issue of Playboy magazine, in which she was the interview subject. She did not appear as a pictorial subject in the magazine, although she did wear the classic leotard and bunny-ears outfit on the cover. That year, she received the Women in Film Crystal Award. For her role as matriarch M'Lynn in the film version of Steel Magnolias (1989), she was nominated for a 1990 Golden Globe Award for Best Actress.
1990–2009: Established actress
In the early 1990s, Field had supporting roles in a number of films. These included Disney's live-action film Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey (1993), where she voiced the role of Sassy. In Mrs. Doubtfire (1993), she played the wife of Robin Williams's character and the love interest of Pierce Brosnan's character. She then played Tom Hanks's mother in Forrest Gump (1994), even though she was only 10 years older than Hanks, with whom she had co-starred six years earlier in Punchline. For Forrest Gump, she received BAFTA and SAG nominations. Field's other 1990s films included Not Without My Daughter, a controversial thriller based on the real-life experience of Betty Mahmoody's escape from Iran with her daughter Mahtob; and Soapdish, a comedy in which she played a pampered soap-opera star and was joined by a cast that included Kevin Kline, Whoopi Goldberg, Cathy Moriarty, Elisabeth Shue, and Robert Downey Jr. In 1996, Field reprised her role as Sassy in…