75 years of Sally Field: Survived a plane crash, abuse and the complicated world of Hollywood

When Sally Field reached adolescence, she plunged into a severe depression. Her condition was so fatal that she accumulated four kilos in just two days. At home, she lived through the sexual abuse of her stepfather, who gradually went from asking her to walk on her naked body to touching her body inappropriately.

As she told in her autobiographical book, In pieces, at the same time as the abuse that Margaret, her middle name, experienced since she was a child, the dynamics at home became somewhat violent due to the wear and tear of the relationship that her mother, the actress, Margaret had. Field, and Jack Mohoney, who worked in the industry as stuntman.

Almost everything was unbearable, but there was something that saved her: art. In particular, acting. That was what she devoted the rest of her life to.

Sally was born in California on Nov 6, 1946.

“I was in so much pain, I was so depressed. I was 19 years old, but fortunately the wonderful actress Medeleine Cherwood literally took me by the hand and took me to an acting studio. That changed my life completely,” said the actress in an interview with Variety.

Although that would not be the only challenge she would face in her career and personal life. Before becoming one of the Oscar-winning actresses, she faced a team that believed that she wasn’t “pretty enough” to make it on the big screen.

She experienced the gender violence that characterizes Hollywood firsthand and even suffered a plane crash that put her family at risk.

This was the life of Sally Margaret Field, 75 years after her birth in the city of Sacramento, California. A woman who rose to fame with a popular Sitcom, was immortalized with two Academy Awards in the category of Best Actress and came to the new generations in roles like Aunt May in Spiderman and Forrest Gump’s mother in the film starring Tom Hanks.

Sally’s mother Margaret broke ground as an actress in 1950s sci-fi movies.

Sally grew up in an environment conducive to being an artist. It was the product of the marriage of the actress, Margaret Field, and a man in charge of sales in the pharmaceutical industry, Richard Field.

Her mother acted in sci-fi movies of the 1950s, such as The man from planet X and Captive Women; so it was only a matter of time before her daughter demonstrated the same talents for the camera.

When she was three years old, his parents’ marriage dissolved for good. So she and her older brother moved in with their maternal grandmother.

For this reason, she herself considers that somehow she grew up in a matriarchy, where the presence of men went unnoticed and none of them stayed for too long. Until a year after breaking up with her father, Margaret began dating Mohoney.

It was not until 2012 when Sally spoke for the first time about the sexual abuse she experienced at the hands of her stepfather. He told it during a conference in which he addressed women of different ages:

“I was shaking when I said it”, she said in reference to the presentation she gave. “But I felt empowered by the faceless mass of unknown people. When I took it out, when I said it, I felt that they had given me something back,” she said.

In 1965, Sally became the protagonist of “Gidget”.

Although she offered more details about what happened in her autobiographical book, the truth is that when she was 14, her stepfather’s sexual abuse stopped. In 1965, when I was 19 years old, Sally’s life completely changed and she became the teen star of the sitcom Gidget.

“I started with this security that youth gives you, which is a protection mechanism, which allows you to manage what was happening. I had this little shine, this little armor, that I had created, that gave me the wits and the strength to get up and say: look at this! ”, she said in an interview where she recalled her participation in the sitcom.

That was her first job, she didn’t have an agent and she just knew she was good at acting. Although her on-screen character, a young woman with high ponytails, color-saturated outfits, and a carefree attitude confronting her first love, was actually very different from how Sally lived outside of fiction. She was much darker.

“When they canceled the show it was very painful for me, I didn’t know what was going to happen. I didn’t have any plans for myself, I didn’t have in mind where I wanted to go, or what was important. I did not have any income from my family, which did not have any, to be the owner of my own destiny,” she confessed in the same interview.

The opportunity came with a second show that she starred in: The Flying Nun. The sitcom ran until 1970. However, these two shows, although they put Sally in the public eye, also managed to pigeonhole her in a less than serious role; Suddenly, she was typified as an actress who was not capable of achieving more complex roles. Although she would later prove this to be wrong.

After a few other television roles, Sally finally made the leap to movies. Although it was not easy, along the way she was met with multiple closed doors and very harsh comments. Even from her own work team: her then agent recommended that she not try to star on the big screen because she lacked beauty.

Actors Sally and Burt Reynodls had a relationship for more than 5 years.

“When I decided that I had to say goodbye to television for good, I told him: ‘I’m not going to work in television anymore,’ and he replied: ‘That’s ridiculous, you can’t do that, you can’t make movies. You’re not pretty enough, you’re not good enough”, she confessed during a conference taken up by the magazine People.

However, the actress was not left: “I replied: ‘You are fired.’ And at the same time, I also left my husband because all he said was, ‘What are we going to do? We don’t have money, ‘the only thing I told him was that we would get out of it (the marriage),” she recalled, referring to her first husband, Steve Craig, from whom she separated in 1975.

Among one of those films in which she first appeared on screen was the Western in which she shared credits with actor Burt Reynolds, who later became his partner: Smokey and the Bandit.

Still from the film “Two lucky rogues”.

Both actors fell in love and shared a relationship apparently without major problems; at least in the media, it was reported that both were a good couple, extremely media and happy. However, during an interview with The New York Times, Sally uncovered how things really were: he was a controlling man and had a drug problem.

During the recording of the tape, Sally recalled that he took some pills like Percodan, Valium and other babiturates. He even injected a substance into his chest. In retrospect, the actress believed that this relationship was only an attempt to recreate the abusive connection she had with her stepfather. However, the courtship spanned several years, although she never agreed to marry him.

Two years after Two lucky rogues, the actress was finally recognized in the industry as a “serious” actress thanks to her role in Norma Rae, a contemporary drama, according to critics of the time.

Thanks to her interpretation, the actress won the award for best female performance at the Cannes Film Festival and an Oscar award in the same category.

Thanks to her role as Norman Rae, the actress gained recognition within the guild.

There would be no more for the actress to repeat the feat and in 1984 she won her second Academy Award for her performance in the drama Places in the Heart, known in Latin America as In a place of the heart. Finally, the actress already enjoyed the success that so much work would have cost her to reap.

However, there was another difficult episode that he faced. In 1988, while he was aboard a jet bound for California, air travel crashed and crashed into two parked aircraft.

As reported by the agency AP, the accident took place on Oct 31, 1988. The actress and other crew members were aboard a jet, Charger CL60 that was heading to Burbank, California. However, when en route, the air transport hit two parked aircraft.

In 1988, the actress and her family faced a plane crash from which they escaped unharmed.

Apparently, it was a problem with the fuel of the ship, according to the actress’s publicist at the time. When they got to safety, they were covered in gasoline: “The gasoline was coming out of the gas tanks. (The actress and the other triplets) they were covered with gasoline. They had to leave the plane and they came out through the wing, then they had to jump six feet to the ground. ”

Of the accident nothing remained but the scratches that the pilot and co-pilot took away. Both the actress and her companions were unharmed.

Over the next decade, the actress continued her career. She became the mother of Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump, in Robin Williams’ partner in Mrs Doubtfire and Aunt May in Spiderman. The actress continued to demonstrate her talent and versatility to this day.

The actress turns 75 in 2021.

At the age of 75, she shares different details of her life on social networks: “I am an actress, a mother, a grandmother, and that’s enough for now,” reads her Twitter biography. It is enough, in a life full of challenges and love of acting, like the one Sally had from her youth.