Sally Field’s Greatest Joy in Life Are Her Three Sons

UPDATED 6/24/2024

Although her career may have started with such light television fare as Gidget and The Flying Nun, over the years actress Sally Field has been the recipient of a tremendous amount of acclaim in the form of a pair of Academy Awards and Golden Globe Awards, three Primetime Emmy Awards, nominations for a Tony Award and two British Academy Awards — yet all of that pales in comparison to her feelings about being a mother.

The 77-year-old actress gave birth to her first two children — Peter and Eli — during her marriage to Steve Craig, who she was with from 1968 to 1975, after which she engaged in a well-publicized relationship with the late Burt Reynolds before getting married to Alan Greisman (who she had son Sam with) — they were wed from 1984 until 1994.

Sally gushed about her sons, saying that “they are kind, loving, productive people, each with their own list of talents and accomplishments. I’m not married; I’m not the kind of person that has a life separate from them. That’s my family. That’s my everything.”

That being said, during her speech at the Human Rights Campaign 2012 national dinner, she reflected on the challenges of being a young parent who had to work. “I had two little kids to take care of,” she told PEOPLE. “I didn’t have the luxury to throw my hands up and say, ‘Forget this whole acting thing — I’m gonna go and open up a boutique in Pasadena.’ My kids were fuel [for me]. More times than not, they literally picked me up when I just felt crushed.”

Earlier this year, Field appeared on Julia Louis Dreyfuss’ podcast Wiser Than Me and explained regarding Peter’s birth, “Having my first son … first of all, I wasn’t alone anymore. I was young, just 23, but there was something in me that felt so fierce about him that I felt, ‘If I can take care of him, I can take care of myself. And goddamn it, I’m going to take care of him. I don’t care if I go down.’ It started to connect with a fierceness in me that I didn’t recognize.

“And I’ve said this to him,” she added. “He saved my life, because it’s also who he was. He was so gentle and compliant. He wasn’t like the kid who was always sick or crying all the time. He was always this creature brought into my life that just, forever after, was my savior.”

Let’s Meet The ‘Three Musketeers’ That Bring Sally Joy

Peter Craig

Born November 10, 1969, Field’s eldest, Peter, is a novelist and screenwriter. In terms of the former, he’s written The Martini Shot (1998),, Hot Plastic (2004) and Blood Father (2005).

“I always wanted to be a mystery writer for most of my life growing up,” he told money-into-light.com. “I was a novelist for a while, a kind of pulpy writer, and I published a few books. They did okay, but I couldn’t really make a living off of it. I would have had to write a couple of books a year, and it wasn’t going to be sustainable.”

What has been sustainable is working as a screenwriter on these projects he’s either written or co-written: Ben Affeck’s The Town (2010), the first two Hunger Games movies (2014 and 2015), the adaptation of his novel Blood Father (2016), the war film 12 Strong (2018), Will Smith and Martin Lawrence’s Bad Boys for Life (2020), Robert Pattinson’s debut as the Dark Knight in The Batman (2022), Tom Cruise mega-hit Top Gun: Maverick (2022) and Jennifer Lopez’ The Mother (2023).

“My mom would let me hang around quite a bit on the movies she didn’t take as seriously; but if it was something that required a complicated performance from her, I was more with my grandmother or dad during that time. I think I got more interested in being a screenwriter when she would do plays.

“There were times when she’d do theater over the summer and I would hang around backstage. My brother and I would sometimes sneak onto stage during the day. I would have been 9 or 10 years old. I got the idea that somebody is writing all this. I was completely fixated on it. My father wanted to be a writer and wrote huge amounts that he never quite finished. He had completely different views of the world and they weren’t all that favorable about Hollywood — but he’d dreamt of being a writer also and used to read me his work growing up.”

Peter’s been married three times — Amy Scattergood from 1995 to 2005, Jennifer DeFrancisco from 2008 to 2017 and Cristina Esposio, who he marred in 2023 — and has three children. He’s 54.

Like his mom, he has three children of his own from his previous marriages to Amy Scattergook and Jennifer DeFrancisco.

RELATED: Jane Fonda, Rita Moreno, Sally Field, Lily Tomlin Team Up For New Tom Brady Film

Eli Craig

Eli was born three years after Peter, in 1972, and has worked as an actor, director, screenwriter, and editor. He began acting in 1999 with that year’s Deal of a Lifetime and The Rage: Carrie 2, followed by Space Cowboys (2000), Racer Number 9 (2005) and Little Evil (2017). As a writer and director, his credits are Tucker & Dale vs. Evil (2010), Little Evil (2017) and Clown in a Cornfield (2024).

Tucker & Dale vs. Evil is a horror comedy that turns some of the tropes of horror films on its head as it focuses on a pair of kind-hearted hillbillies who a group of college students believe are killer and start hunting them down. When asked about the strength of the film by cine-vue.com, he replied it was the comedic elements.

“I call this film a comedy/horror film because we decided really early on the process that the goriest moments in the film also had to be the funniest; it had to have this charm and the humor had to stay with the film the entire time. The other thing is that you really fall in love with Tucker and Dale [Alan Tudyk and Tyler Labine] — they’re genuine actors and characters who are not there winking at the camera, they are playing real emotions. We treated this as a ‘real’ movie inside of a horror movie — it had to have real heart and not just be goofy.”

In 2004, he married Sasha Williams and they’ve given Sally Field grandchildren Noah and Colin.

Sam Greisman

Field and her second husband, Alan, had Sam in December 1987. Like his half brothers, he is also towing their mother’s path as a film person, though his focus has been as a writer/director of short films like Pipe Dream (2015) and Dinner with Jeffrey (2016).

Sam recently came out gay, and Field has expressed her support for his sexuality, saying: “It’s important for a parent to talk about raising a gorgeous, proud, smart, funny, lovable, sexy gay child, There are so many parents who are frightened of that and who don’t embrace their children as they struggle to embrace who they are, what nature intended them to be.”

He also offered the following in an essay for PEOPLE: “I grew up so connected to my mom that I can trace my life through her career. While she shot Mrs. Doubtfire, I built model airplanes and hung them all over our rented house in San Francisco. During Forrest Gump, I would get to buy something at the toy store in Beaufort, South Carolina if I slept through the night without a pacifier. I fell in love with New York while she was on Broadway in The Goat. The first week of shooting on Brothers & Sisters was rearranged so that she could move me into my dorm at NYU. Later, a frank, heartfelt conversation about my queerness was used verbatim for a scene between her and Matthew Rhys. Still waiting on a retroactive writing credit on that, if I’m being perfectly honest.”

Sally Field’s support for the LGBTQ community

Being a mother to a member of the LGBTQ community herself, the actress encourages her son by partnering with him to promote the Equality of Civil Rights Act for the LGBTQ community in the United States. Sam expresses that his mother is the best guardian any gay person could ever need, as she was there for him while he battled mental health crises as a teenager and his struggles of coming out .

Mother and son work as a team to enlighten LGBTQ people about their rights and place in society against workplace and economic discrimination.