

Her wholesome early roles on sitcoms made it nearly impossible to transition to serious projects, Field tells NPR. "Like flipping a switch, I began to bubble," she writes about her early roles on Gidget and The Flying Nun. The abuse was both emotional and sexual, and Field says those experiences forced her to divide herself into pieces to survive to wall off the pain and push forward. In the book, Field describes the abuse she suffered at the hands of her stepfather, actor Jock Mahoney.
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But her TV persona was at odds with her home life. But her new book, In Pieces, is instead an intensely personal, vulnerable accounting of her life and career.įield, now 71, got her start when she was a teenager on the 1960s TV sitcom Gidget, in which she played the title character - a squeaky clean surfer girl living with her loving, widowed father. You really, really like me" when she said, "I can't deny the fact that you like me, right now, you like me.After experiencing abuse as a child, Sally Field says she internalized that "to feel loved you have to be invisible and terrified." Her new memoir is called In Pieces.Įmmy- and Oscar-winning actress Sally Field could have written a famous-people-I've-known memoir. I'll take anything you’ve got."įield also spoke about her infamous Oscars speech for Places in the Heart - and how it's often misquoted as "You like me.

("I had to make a living, so I never felt the luxury to say, 'Well, I’' going to hold out for more money.' I felt like I was a poor kid. Some less horrific and some more horrific.") She also spoke about pay disparity. Yes, she endured sexual harassment along the way. Smokey and the Bandit helped put her on the map and she went on to win two Academy Awards, first for 1979's Norma Rae and then 1984's Places in the Heart. And it just made me work and work and work and do things maybe I would not have done before." But at that point in my life I didn't have the skills to recognize what was happening to me … and being able to see what your dreams are."įield, who is also in HBO's Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty, "had to like claw my way out of because they wouldn’t let me in a door. You're trying to cover up your depression. And those are the times when you realize that there's a reason why you're eating so much but trying to hide. I just had to put my head down and go to work and do the very best job I could.
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It's important to learn how to survive things, things you like, things you don't like.
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She became a TV star as Gidget in 1965, but her years as the Flying Nun (1967 to ’70) were unsatisfying and she longed for movie roles. In the interview, Field - who is working on the road-trip movie 80 for Brady with Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Rita Moreno - spoke about her long career in Hollywood, calling it a business that "can really kick the poop out of you." She "was exorcising something that needed to be exorcised."įield, who married twice (both ended in divorce), issued a nice statement after Reynolds's death. Field wrote said in hindsight, the relationship with Reynolds was her attempt to recreate a version of her relationship with her stepfather, Jock Mahoney, a stuntman and actor, who she claimed in the book sexually abused her until she was 14. (Reynolds's second wife, Loni Anderson, also detailed Reynolds's drug use in her memoir, and said it led to him physically abusing her.)įield and Reynolds dated on and off for five years and made four movies together.

She said he was controlling and hurtful, and detailed his drug usage, claiming he used Percodan, Valium, and barbiturates while making Smokey and the Bandit. 18, 2018 - coincidentally 12 days after Reynolds's death - and in it, she wrote about their complicated relationship. I just didn't want to deal with that."įield's memoir, In Pieces, came out on Sept.

He just wanted to have the thing he didn’t have. (Photo: Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images)Īs for his public proclamations, Field, 75, said, Reynolds, who died from a heart attack at age 82, "somehow invented in his rethinking of everything that I was more important to him than he had thought, but I wasn’t. Burt Reynolds and Sally Field out together in L.A.
