American icon Sally Field has two Academy Awards, two Golden Globes, two BAFTAs, three Emmys, and a Tony nomination. She’s been awarded the National Medal of Arts, the Kennedy Center Honor, and the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award in 2023. We’ve rightfully celebrated Field’s career for decades.
Her first role was as the nation’s favorite girl next door, Gidget. She followed that surprisingly short-lived show with The Flying Nun and The Girl with Something Extra (which was essentially Gidget with ESP) before breaking out of that prim and proper shell with the 1976 TV movie Sybil.
Initially typecast as a comedic actress after her TV run, she starred in the wildly popular movie Smokey and the Bandit with Burt Reynolds and Jackie Gleason in 1977. Playing the titular role of a union organizer in 1979’s Norma Rae won Field awards and established her as a powerful dramatic actress. This carried her career into the ’80s with Back Roads and Absence of Malice. She won her second Oscar and Golden Globe for her role in the Depression-era drama Places in the Heart, which gave us this classic Academy Awards moment:
As famous as she’s been, aside from her on-again-off-again relationship with Burt Reynolds, which generated tabloid fodder in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Sally Field has kept her private life out of the spotlight throughout her career.
This weekend, perhaps following the lead of her longtime friend and mentor Jane Fonda, Sally Field took to social media to share the story of the abortion she underwent in 1963. It’s something she wrote about in her 2018 memoir, In Pieces, but it’s different to tell these stories out loud.
Ten years before Roe v. Wade, a family friend drove then seventeen-year-old Field and her mother to Tijuana, Mexico, for the illegal procedure. It’s a harrowing tale that she still feels a lot of shame about. And it’s one that many women of her generation have in common.
Post by @corey.marshallsteele
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Sally Field is a brave lady who understands what’s at stake on election day. We’ve got 28 days left. Don’t let Sally down.