Sally Margaret Field (born November 6, 1946) is an American two-time Academy Award-winning, a three-time Emmy Award winner and two-time Golden Globe Award winner-actress.
Field was born in Pasadena, California, the daughter of Maggie, an actress, and Richard Dryden Field, who worked in sales. Her parents divorced in 1950 and her mother subsequently remarried to actor and stuntman Jock Mahoney. She attended Portola Middle School then Birmingham High School in Van Nuys, California where she was a cheerleader. Among her classmates were famed financier Michael Milken, fellow actress Cindy Williams and Michael Ovitz of CAA and Walt Disney Studios fame.
Field got her start on television, as the boy-struck surfer girl in the mid-1960s surf culture sitcom series Gidget. She then went on to star in her best-known television role, as Sister Bertrille in The Flying Nun. She had several guest appearances, including a recurring role on the western comedy Alias Smith and Jones starring Pete Duel and Ben Murphy, and the Rod Serling's Night Gallery episode The Whisper. Having played mostly comic characters on television, Field had a difficult time being cast in dramatic roles. She studied with famed acting teacher Lee Strasberg, who had previously helped Marilyn Monroe go beyond the "bimbo" roles with which her career had begun. Soon after, Field landed the title role in the 1976 TV film Sybil, the first of two known to have been based on the book written by Flora Rheta Schreiber. Field's dramatic portrayal of Sybil, a young woman afflicted with Dissociative identity disorder in the TV film not only garnered her an Emmy Award in 1977, but also enabled her to break through the typecasting she had experienced from television roles.
Field had a number of critical and commercial successes in movies, particularly in the 1980s. In 1977, she co-starred with Burt Reynolds, Jackie Gleason and Jerry Reed in that year's #2 grossing film Smokey and the Bandit.
In 1979, she played a union organizer in Norma Rae, a successful film that established her status as a dramatic actress. She won the Best Female Performance Prize at the Cannes Film Festival and the Academy Award for Best Actress. In 1981, Field played a prostitute opposite Tommy Lee Jones in the South-set comedy Back Roads, which received middling reviews and grossed $11 million at the box office. Field won another Academy Award in 1985 for her starring role in Places in the Heart.
She has had supporting roles in other movies, including Mrs. Doubtfire (1993) in which she played the wife of Robin Williams and the love interest of Pierce Brosnan, followed by the role of Forrest's mother in Forrest Gump (1994). She is only 10 years older than Tom Hanks, with whom she had co-starred six years earlier in Punchline. Field was a late addition to the ABC drama Brothers & Sisters, which debuted in September 2006. In the show's pilot, the role of matriarch Nora Walker had been played by actress Betty Buckley. However, the producers of the show decided to take the character of Nora in another direction, and Field was cast in the role. She won the 2007 Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series in her role as Nora Walker. Recently had a voice role as Marina del Ray, the villain in Disney's The Little Mermaid: Ariel's Beginning, which was released in August of 2008. Currently, Field can be seen on television as the compensated spokesperson for Roche Laboratories' postmenopausal osteoporosis treatment medication, Boniva. Field is seen on TV as the main character in commercials for Boniva.
Field married Steven Craig in 1968. The couple had two sons, Peter Craig, a novelist, and Eli, an actor and director. They divorced in 1975.
In 1976, Field began a live-in relationship with Major Daniel M. Yoder, USAF. Their relationship ended in 1978.
Field was romantically involved with Burt Reynolds for many years, during that time they co-starred in several movies, including Smokey and the Bandit, Smokey and the Bandit II, and The End.
In 1984, she married film producer Alan Greisman. They had one son, Sam. Field and Greisman divorced in 1993.
On October 29, 1988, she and her family survived a crash of their charter plane which lost power on takeoff.