Sally Field Says Being "Too Cute and Perky” Was a Struggle as a Young Actress
Sally Field is one of the 2019 Kennedy Center Honor recipients.
The 73-year-old actress says she struggled to make it in the film industry back in the 1960s and '70s.
The Oscar winner has starred in dozens of movies and television series over the years, including Gidget, Smokey and the Bandit, Norma Rae, and Heroes.
Given Sally Field's wildly successful career — which includes two Oscars for her starring roles in Norma Rae (1979) and Places in the Heart (1984) as well as icon status thanks to her characters in Smokey and the Bandit (1977) and Steel Magnolias (1989) — it's hard to imagine that there was a time where she struggled to get noticed in Hollywood. But as the 2019 Kennedy Center Honors award recipient made clear to The Guardian in 2017, she was typecast as a young actress, which made it difficult to land roles she was passionate about.
"I never felt that I had very many choices," Sally told the publication. "Ever. It’s always been a tremendous struggle to find something that I wanted to do and also at the same time, earlier on in my life, to be able to support my children."
Sally, now a mother of three, started off her career in TV comedies throughout the 1960s, most notably starring in the sitcom The Flying Nun. Despite landing leading-lady roles on the small screen, she had to "claw" her way out from only doing television because, as Sally said, "films didn't want anything to do with television."
"They weren't making any movies with anybody other than models," she claimed.
When asked if she wasn't "pretty enough" for film, Sally said she believes it was the complete opposite problem.
"Absolutely not. I was way too cute and perky," she said. "It wasn’t until the late '70s that films started to get grittier and they were looking for a different kind of actor. Even when I finally got into that door, made those transitions, as hard as they were, it still was incredibly difficult."
Apart from Norma Rae and Smokey the Bandit, the late '70s was when Sally starred in Heroes (1977), The End (1977), and Beyond the Poseidon Adventure (1979).
But it was a struggle to land these parts, Sally reiterated to ABC News's Diane Sawyer in 2018. Sally explained that while her gig on The Flying Nun made her a household name at the time, it also made it that much harder for her to be taken seriously. She recalled her first Golden Globes experience where she was forced to fly through the theater onto the stage as a nod to her Flying Nun character.
“I was wearing a pink taffeta culottes outfit," she recalled. "My hair was in ringlets. I mean, what on Earth was I thinking?”
She continued: “I'm flying across the Coconut Grove, looking down at everyone I wanted to know and be."
Of course, in the end, Sally got the last laugh. She went on to land leading roles in major films, direct and produce, and star in multiple Broadway productions.
"It is a lifetime of work and struggle and success and failure," she said. "The times when you feel absolutely slammed to the ground with defeat or disappointment or loss, just hopeless ... it’s up to you to be in pain and feel it and stand up and move again.”
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