Sally Field turns 80 on Friday, November 6, and she is arriving at the milestone on a winning streak. In September, she won her fourth Emmy as Tova Sullivan in Netflix’s Remarkably Bright Creatures, and at 79 she became the oldest winner ever in her category, edging past Jessica Tandy’s record, as Variety reported. “I have been so grateful and so proud to be a part of this community, the arts, for 62 years or something,” she told the crowd.
Sixty-two years of Gidget, The Flying Nun, Norma Rae and playing Mrs. Gump, and for most of that time, Field was carrying a secret she had never told anyone, not even her mother, part of a family history colored by pain and betrayal.
Did Sally Field Really Hate ‘The Flying Nun’?
Field was born in Pasadena, California, on November 6, 1946, the daughter of actress Margaret Field, and she was a teenager when Gidget made her a star in 1965. Two years later, ABC strapped her into a harness for The Flying Nun, and she has never pretended to like it.
“I didn’t want to do The Flying Nun,” she said on NPR’s Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! this August, as TV Insider reported. “I would have rather just been a nun with my feet on the ground.” The flying, she explained, was done the hard way. “There was no special effects. So it was wires. I was on a 50-foot crane some of the times, and they would fly me into the side of a building.”
The higher cost came after the show ended in 1970. Casting directors had her filed under sitcom cuteness. “They thought they already knew what I was,” she told People this spring. “‘No, thanks. We don’t want any of that.'” She has credited Jack Nicholson with helping end the dry spell, and you can read more about her feelings toward Sister Bertrille here. Through all of it, though, the hardest thing in her life was not anything that happened on a set.
What Did Sally Field Reveal About Her Stepfather?
In 1952, when Sally was 5, her mother married Jock Mahoney, a stuntman and actor who would later play Tarzan in the movies. In her 2018 memoir, In Pieces, Field wrote that he sexually abused her, and that it stopped after she turned 14.
She also described the confusing pull he had on the whole family. “He could be magical, the Pied Piper with our family as his entranced followers,” she wrote, in passages first reported by the New York Times and quoted by E! News.
She told NPR that keeping the secret shaped who she became. “As a child, because of my relationship with my stepfather… I couldn’t ever say what I was really feeling. So I had to be invisible,” she said, as KPBS reported. She was not even sure the book would ever see daylight. “I wrote it for myself. I didn’t know whether I’d ever have the guts to publish it.”
Her mother divorced Mahoney in 1968, and he died in 1989. For decades after that, Sally still said nothing to her mother about what had happened.
What Did Sally Field Actually Say At The Oscars?
If you want to understand the girl who learned to be invisible, watch the woman who won her second Oscar—for Places in the Heart—in March 1985.
What she actually said was, “I can’t deny the fact that you like me. Right now, you like me!” The world turned it into “You like me, you really like me,” and comedians spent years mocking it.
She has made her peace with the joke, mostly. “Sometimes I want to punch them in the nose, but mostly because they don’t ever say the context of what I said before,” she told The Independent in 2022, in remarks carried by Yahoo. She admitted she could have been more eloquent. Then she said what the moment had really meant. “To me, what mattered was for that one moment in time I did it. I did it.”
When Did Sally Field Finally Tell Her Mother?
The conversation she had avoided for half a century finally happened in 2011. Field had just been cast as Mary Todd Lincoln in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, and her mother was ill. Sally told her what Mahoney had done. According to the New York Times interview about the memoir, her mother told her she would not be alone in that pain any longer.
Margaret Field died that November, at 89, in Malibu. The date was November 6, 2011, Sally’s 65th birthday, as the Television Academy noted in remembering her. So this Friday, as Sally Field turns 80 with a new Emmy on the shelf and three grown sons, the joy of her life, it will also be 15 years to the day since she lost the mother she finally told. The little girl who once had to be invisible is, at 80, impossible to miss.
79-Year-Old Peter Noone Explained Who Really Owns The Herman’s Hermits Name