Sally Field

Sally Field was born November 6, 1946, in Pasadena, California, to actress Margaret Field and Army officer Richard Dryden Field. After her parents’ divorce, her mother married stuntman Jock Mahoney, a presence that linked Field’s childhood to Hollywood. She attended Birmingham High School in Van Nuys and began television work in the mid-1960s. Her first starring role was the title character in ABC’s sitcom Gidget (1965–1966), playing the surf-obsessed teenager Frances Elizabeth Lawrence. Although the series lasted one season, it became popular in reruns. Field then starred as novice nun Sister Bertrille in The Flying Nun (1967–1970), whose cornette enabled her to become airborne in the show’s comic premise. Seeking less lightweight parts, Field worked with acting teacher Lee Strasberg and took the title role in Sybil (1976), a television film about a young woman diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder. Her film breakthrough followed in Norma Rae (1979). As a North Carolina textile worker who joins a union-organizing drive, she memorably raises a handwritten “UNION” sign on the factory floor. The performance won her the Academy Award for Best Actress. Field received a second Best Actress Oscar for Places in the Heart (1984), portraying Edna Spalding, a Texas widow struggling to keep her farm during the Depression. At the 1985 ceremony, her emotional acceptance speech included the line, “You like me, right now, you like me!” Her later screen work includes Steel Magnolias (1989), in which she played M’Lynn Eatenton, mother of Julia Roberts’s Shelby; Mrs. Doubtfire (1993), as Miranda Hillard; and Forrest Gump (1994), as Forrest’s devoted mother. Field later portrayed Mary Todd Lincoln in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln (2012), earning an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her performance. On television, Field played the formidable Nora Walker on Brothers & Sisters from 2006 to 2011, winning the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series in 2007. She later received Emmy nominations for portraying the manipulative matriarch Janice in Netflix’s Dead to Me. Field has also directed for television and film. Her directing debut, Beautiful (2000), starred Minnie Driver as a small-town Illinois woman pursuing the Miss America pageant and earned Driver an Oscar nomination. Field directed an episode of ER and appeared on it as Maggie Wyczenski, the mother of Maura Tierney’s Abby Lockhart. In 2012 and 2014, she played Aunt May Parker in The Amazing Spider-Man and its sequel, opposite Andrew Garfield.