Oscar-winner Sally Field’s career spans nearly 60 years, from the time she began playing precocious teenager Gidget on television to her new comedy Brady’s 80.
On Sunday, the 76-year-old will receive a lifetime achievement award from the Screen Actors Guild.
“She has an enduring career because she is authentic in her performance and always exudes sympathy and humanity – she just connects,” SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher said in a statement. “It’s one of the reasons she’s sustained her massive fandom and incredibly rich and diverse career. Sally is a huge star with a working actor ethos – just keep going and be the best you can be. Each stage in an actor’s life brings with it different opportunities, and you just have to keep working. Sally doesn’t stop and we hope she never does.”
Here’s a look back at the actress’ prolific work.
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Sally Field’s television and film career has spanned seven decades. (JC Olivera/WireImage)
“gidget”
As an 18-year-old, Field wore pigtails and a bikini when she starred in the 1965 comedy series of the same name, about a Southern California girl who loves the beach and boys. It was her first big role.
In 2008, Field told Oprah Winfrey she got the part after a casting director who saw her at an acting workshop asked her to come to an audition.
“The waiting room was full of girls who looked like movie stars,” she said of her Gidget audition. “They all had professional headshots; the only pictures I had were wallet photos of me with my friends. For my screen test, I walked in and said, ‘Which one is the camera?’ The crew members said, ‘Oh boy.’ But the casting director said, “It’s you.” God took care of me. He thought he would throw me into the sea and see if I could swim.”
Field called the lead role in the one-season comedy “bliss.”
“I’ve been in heaven and learned as much as I could learn,” she told Winfrey. “I loved, loved, loved every minute of it. On the show, Don Porter, who played my father, was this sweet, loving, gentle, generous man you wish was your father.”
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Field landed her first starring role in 1965’s Gidget. (ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty Images)
“The Flying Nun”
In 1967, Field moved on to another sitcom, The Flying Nun, in which she portrayed Sister Bertrille, a do-gooder unafraid to help people with her aerodynamic cornette.
However, the actress told Winfrey that she never wanted the role. “I didn’t want to do it. I was trying to figure out who I was, but I knew who I wasn’t: a flying nun,” she said. “I was almost 19 and my sexuality needed to be explored. So I said no, which I thought was incredibly brave.”
Field said her stepfather persuaded her to take the role because he said if she didn’t take it, she might never work again.
The actress said she took the job out of “fear” and that it’s become “three long, tough years” and the show has become a huge joke. “I felt vilified as a person,” she admitted.
In 2017, Field told the Guardian that she felt she had to “scrape out” of being typecast as a sitcom star.
“I started so young and got sucked into TV and then it took me a long time to get out of TV,” she said. “Movies didn’t want anything to do with television. They didn’t do movies with anyone other than models.”
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Field said she never wanted to take on the role of Sister Bertrille on The Flying Nun. (Getty)
“Sybil” and transition to the cinema
As she neared her 30s, Field said she began her “transition to film.”
She earned a role in 1976’s Stay Hungry, playing what she called a “nymphomaniac” and filming her first nude scene.
That same year, she was cast to star in the miniseries Sybil, in which she played a woman with multiple personality disorder. Field told Bustle that no one wanted her for the role.
“I knew no one wanted me in the room,” Field said, adding, “I knew I had to be so good that they couldn’t turn away.” She won her first Emmy Award for that role.
“Sybil” led to her being cast as Carrie on “Smokey and the Bandit,” she said, for which Burt Reynolds personally called her.
“There wasn’t a script, we ended up making up half the movie,” Field told Winfrey. She starred with Reynolds, who she dated for three years.
In “Sybil” Sally Field played a woman with multiple personality disorder. (NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images via Getty Images)
“Norma Rae” and “Places in the Heart”
In 1980, Field won her first Academy Award for her role as the title character in “Norma Rae,” about a factory worker who unionizes at the cotton mill where she works.
Five years later, she won her second Academy Award for the historical drama Places in the Heart and delivered one of the most quoted (or misquoted) acceptance speeches in the history of the show, in which she said, “You like me!”
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“This means so much more to me this time,” she said in her speech. “I think I hardly felt it the first time because everything was so new.”
In the speech, Field admitted that she didn’t have an “orthodox” career and wanted the respect of the film community “more than anything.” “I didn’t feel it the first time, but this time I feel it. And I can’t deny the fact that you like me right now, you like me,” she said.
Field gave her the infamous “You like me!” Acceptance speech at the 1985 Academy Awards for her role in Places in the Heart. (ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty Images)
“Steel Magnolias”, “Mrs. Doubtfire, Forrest Gump, and more
Throughout the remainder of the ’80s and ’90s, Field, who is now an established two-time Oscar winner, continued to take on various roles in films, including Steel Magnolias, in which she played a mother who loses her adult daughter (Julia Roberts) to complications from diabetes after birth.
Field returned in 1993’s Mrs. Doubtfire” returned to her comedy roots, playing the straight woman in Robin Williams’ iconic crossdressing character.
The next year, she portrayed Tom Hanks’ mother in Forrest Gump. Hanks won an Academy Award for Best Actor for the role in 1995.
Field played Tom Hanks’ mother in Forrest Gump. (Sunset Blvd/Getty Images)
later work
In 2006, Field returned to television, playing matriarch Nora Walker on the family drama series Brothers & Sisters. She won an Emmy Award for this role in 2007.
Field won another Emmy in 2001 for guest starring on ER.
In 2013, she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role as Mary Todd in Lincoln, opposite Daniel Day-Lewis. Day-Lewis won for best actor.
Field told NPR that she had been fighting for the role after director Steven Spielberg originally suggested it to her a few years earlier in 2005.
“It would be perfectly legitimate for Steven to walk away from me because I’m 10 years older than Daniel and 20 years older than Mary,” she said of the film. “But I felt like you wouldn’t really see the age because they’re both so exhausted, and I know how brilliant Daniel is and would be … So Steven let me fight for that.”
Field, flanked by Tommy Lee Jones, Daniel Day-Lewis and Steven Spielberg, was cast as Mary Todd in 2012’s Lincoln. (Neilson Barnard/Getty Images for Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures)
“80 for Brady”
Earlier this month, Field’s latest comedy, 80 for Brady, was released, a film about four friends who love quarterback Tom Brady and go to Super Bowl 2017 to see him play.
Field expressed her excitement at meeting NFL stars for the film’s premiere at the Palm Springs International Film Festival on Jan. 6.
“I was the one out there that welcomed everyone,” she said during a panel discussion with co-stars Jane Fonda, Rita Moreno and Lily Tomlin, according to Variety.
“There was nobody else there,” Tomlin quipped. “No PAs out there, just Sally.”
Field continued, “I was out there, ‘Hi guys! I’m so glad you guys are here.’ “I wanted them to be comfortable. I was a fan and I welcomed them out there.”
Former NFL star Rob Gronkowski joked on Brady’s Let’s Go podcast that despite their 31-year age difference, he should consider a relationship with Field.
Based on a true story, 80 for Brady follows four die-hard New England Patriots fans as they set out to see quarterback Tom Brady play the Atlanta Falcons in the 2017 Super Bowl. (Paramount Pictures Corporation)
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“We had kind of a little thing on camera, you know what’s going on,” the seven-time Super Bowl champion teased.
Ashley Hume of Fox News and The Associated Press contributed to this report.