Sally Field

Sally Field (born November 6, 1946, Pasadena, California, U.S.) American actress known for playing firebrands and steely matriarchs.

Field played lighthearted television roles in Gidget (1965–66) and The Flying Nun (1967–70) before developing her talent at the Actors Studio (1973–75), from which she emerged as a dramatic actress. After she starred in the television movie Sybil (1977, Emmy Award), Hollywood finally rewarded her with strong roles. In Norma Rae (1979) she portrayed a union organizer, and for her performance Field won an Academy Award. In 1981 she was cast as a journalist who wrongly implicates a businessman (Paul Newman) for murder in Absence of Malice. Field received her second Oscar for the Depression-era drama Places in the Heart (1984), in which she played a mother struggling to keep her farming family intact. During her acceptance speech, Field exclaimed, “You like me, you really like me,” a phrase that quickly entered the canon of familiar pop-culture quotations. She played another strong-willed matriarch in Steel Magnolias (1989).

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Field’s later films included the comedies Soapdish (1991), Mrs. Doubtfire (1993), Forrest Gump (1994), and Two Weeks (2006). In Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln (2012), she portrayed Mary Todd Lincoln. She subsequently was cast in The Amazing Spider-Man (2012), The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014), and Hello, My Name Is Doris (2015). In the sports comedy 80 for Brady (2023), she costarred with Jane Fonda, Rita Moreno, and Lily Tomlin.

Field also continued to appear on television. She had a recurring role on ER from 2000 to 2006, and she starred in the drama series Brothers & Sisters (2006–11); she earned Emmy Awards (2001 and 2007) for her work on both shows. Field later appeared in the Netflix series Maniac (2018), portraying the mother of a mad scientist. In 2020 she starred in Dispatches from Elsewhere, a series inspired by an alternate-reality game. She also appeared in the HBO series Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty (2022– ), about the famed NBA team.

During this time, Field also appeared on the stage. In 2002 she made her Broadway debut in the first staging of Edward Albee’s The Goat; or, Who Is Sylvia?. She returned to the stage in 2017 for a revival of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, and her performance as the domineering matriarch Amanda Wingfield earned Field a Tony Award nomination. Her memoir, In Pieces (2018), revealed a traumatic childhood in which she was sexually abused by her stepfather.