NEED TO KNOW
Sally Field appears in this week’s issue of PEOPLE, sharing stories from her over six decades working in Hollywood
After three years on the absurdist 1967 sitcom The Flying Nun, a dry spell began where Field “couldn’t get in a room to audition”
Field says Jack Nicholson, after seeing her perform at the Actors Studio, quietly helped her nab an audition for her breakout film role in 1976’s Stay Hungry
Sally Field famously had a hard time being taken seriously in Hollywood after starring inThe Flying Nun. It was Jack Nicholson, she reveals, who helped end her drought.
Speaking to PEOPLE in this week’s issue, Field, 79, says that after breaking out in the fantasy sitcom in the early 1970s, she “couldn’t get in a room to audition. I couldn’t get on the list. They thought they already knew what I was. ‘No, thanks. We don’t want any of that.’”
The two-time Oscar winner recalls coming up with a career mantra: “I had to say to myself that if I wasn’t where I wanted to be, I had to get better.” Hollywood may be “rotten” and “unfair,” she adds, but “it had to be that it was on me to make it different. I felt if I wasn’t doing that, then I was just handing them all the power.”
Field says she began studying at the infamous Actor Studio in Los Angeles, and Nicholson, 89, was among the many “wonderful actors, really working actors” training with its founder and coach Lee Strasberg: “Everybody used to come. It was packed. You couldn’t get in.”
Sally Field in 1967
Credit: Ron Thal /TV Guide/courtesy Everett Collection
Training in performance techniques “constantly, as much as I possibly could,” recalls the actress, “I said to myself, ‘It will change when I’m good enough.’ And ultimately, in a weird way, it happened because I was acting at the studio so much.”
It was Nicholson, Field shares, who saw her working with Strasberg and recommended her as “an undiscovered talent” to the late casting director Dianne Crittenden and director Bob Rafelson. Crittenden went on to call the actress in for a meeting — her first real “interview” since the 1965 sitcom Gidget, she says — for Stay Hungry, the Rafelson-directed comedy-drama set at a gym.
“So in some weird way, my theory was right,” she says. “I worked at the Actors Studio for so long — and it was so hard — that Jack had seen it and the word spread.”
Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sally Field in ‘Stay Hungry’
Credit: Glasshouse Images/Shutterstock
Booking that role opposite Jeff Bridges and then-newcomer Arnold Schwarzenegger, she concludes, “was the beginning of the change” to a more meaningful career in Hollywood. The same year Stay Hungry established Field as a movie star, she won an Emmy for the miniseries Sybil, launching her toward Smokey and the Bandit, Norma Rae, Places in the Heart and beyond.
Now with two Oscars, two Emmys and a Tony nomination to her name, Field, who stars in the new film Remarkably Bright Creatures, says she remains focused on what’s ahead. [Acting] is what I do,” she says simply. “I’m supposed to go into rehearsals for a play at the end of summer. I still have my head down, and I’m always hoping to get better.”
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Remarkably Bright Creatures, adapted from the bestselling book by Shelby Van Pelt, is streaming on Netflix now.
For more stories behind the scenes of Field’s storied career, pick up a copy of PEOPLE, on newsstands now.
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