Sally Field turns 80 today, November 6, 2026, and somewhere in the back of every boomer’s memory she is still 20 years old, standing on a windy bluff above San Juan in a starched white cornette, waiting for a gust to lift her into the sky. The Flying Nun premiered on ABC on September 7, 1967, built on Tere Ríos’s 1965 novel The Fifteenth Pelican, and its premise was as simple as it was silly. Sister Bertrille weighed less than 90 pounds, so a stiff breeze under that oversized headpiece was all it took to send her soaring over Convent San Tanco.
The show ran three seasons and 82 episodes before it landed for good on April 3, 1970, and it surrounded Field with a sharp ensemble of stage veterans, character actors and a dashing Argentine leading man. Fifty-six years later, only one of those seven familiar faces is still with us, and the woman who wore the cornette has had very mixed feelings about it ever since.
Is Alejandro Rey Still Alive?
Every convent comedy needs temptation, and The Flying Nun found it in Carlos Ramirez, the handsome playboy who owned the local casino. Carlos was forever being talked into helping the sisters with one scheme or another, and Alejandro Rey played him with a wink that kept the whole arrangement perfectly innocent.
Rey was born in Buenos Aires on February 8, 1930, and he had already acted in Argentine films before Hollywood noticed him. American audiences got an early look at him in 1963 when he appeared alongside Elvis Presley and Ursula Andress in Fun in Acapulco. After the convent closed its doors, he kept busy for another 17 years, playing Orlando Ramirez opposite Robin Williams in Moscow on the Hudson in 1984 and turning up for seven episodes of Dallas in 1986 as Captain Luis Rueda. He also directed television, and when he died the Los Angeles Times remembered him in its headline as both a “‘Flying Nun’ Actor” and a “TV Director.”
Sadly, no. Alejandro Rey died of lung cancer on May 21, 1987, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. He was 57, and he was the first of the show’s regulars to go.
His character’s chief nuisance in San Tanco was a police captain who never quite knew what to make of a flying nun.
Is Vito Scotti Still Alive?
Captain Gaspar Fomento was the local law, a fussy, harried officer who usually ended up on the wrong end of Sister Bertrille’s latest adventure. Vito Scotti played him in the first two seasons, and if his face looked familiar, that was because you had seen it everywhere.
Scotti was born Vito Giusto Scozzari in San Francisco on January 26, 1918, and he became one of the busiest character actors of his era. He played a stranded Japanese sailor who didn’t know World War II had ended on Gilligan’s Island, then came back to the island twice as the mad scientist Dr. Boris Balinkoff. He popped up on The Addams Family in three different roles and appeared in six episodes of Columbo as everything from a maître d’ to an undertaker. In 1972 he played Nazorine, the baker, in The Godfather. Off camera he was a gifted cook, and the Desert Sun devoted a 1970 story to his Italian cooking.
No, he is not. Vito Scotti died of lung cancer on June 5, 1996, at the Motion Picture and Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, California. He was 78. The Tampa Bay Times summed up his career in a single phrase when it reported his death, calling him the “Man of a thousand faces.”
One of the younger sisters had a résumé that reached all the way back to Neverland.
Is Linda Dangcil Still Alive?
Linda Dangcil played Sister Ana, one of the younger nuns at San Tanco, in 37 episodes. By the time she put on a habit, the trained dancer had already worked with some of Broadway’s biggest names.
Born in San Francisco on June 19, 1941, Dangcil was still a teenager in the mid-1950s when she appeared with Mary Martin in Peter Pan, both on Broadway and in the television version. According to BroadwayWorld, Jerome Robbins later chose her as one of the principal dancers in the 1961 film West Side Story. After The Flying Nun, she guest-starred on Here Come the Brides opposite Bruce Lee, spent a long stretch as Elena on the PBS bilingual children’s series Villa Alegre, and lent her voice to the 1980s cartoon Jem.
No. Linda Dangcil died on May 7, 2009, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, after what The Hollywood Reporter described as an eight-year battle with throat cancer. She was 67, and she was survived by her husband, jazz musician Dick Hamilton.
The sister who struggled most with English would find her biggest fame three decades later, in a completely different kind of uniform.
Is Shelley Morrison Still Alive?
Sister Sixto was the Puerto Rican nun whose tangled English produced some of the show’s biggest laughs, and Shelley Morrison played her from 1967 until the series ended. The irony was that Morrison had grown up speaking Spanish at home. She was born Rachel Mitrani in the Bronx on October 26, 1936, to Jewish parents from Spain, and she spoke mostly Spanish as a child.
Her second great act came in 1999, when she booked what was supposed to be a single episode of NBC’s Will & Grace as Rosario Salazar, the unflappable maid to Megan Mullally’s Karen Walker. Rosario stayed until 2006 and even married Sean Hayes’s Jack McFarland to avoid deportation. “Rosario is one of my all-time favorite characters,” Morrison once said, according to The Times of Israel.
Shelley Morrison died of heart failure after a brief illness on December 1, 2019, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. She was 83. Hayes said she “was absolutely hilarious and had the biggest heart,” and her husband of 46 years, Walter Dominguez, said she “believed that the best way to change hearts and minds was through comedy.”
The nun who narrated every episode lived longer than anyone else in the cast, and her death stayed a secret for months.
Is Marge Redmond Still Alive?
Sister Jacqueline was Bertrille’s wise, wry friend inside the convent walls, and Marge Redmond also served as the show’s narrator. The part earned her an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series for the 1967 to 1968 season, though she lost to Marion Lorne of Bewitched. Redmond had warmed up for the role by playing a nun just a year earlier, as Sister Liguori opposite Rosalind Russell and Hayley Mills in The Trouble with Angels.
Born in Cleveland on December 14, 1924, and raised in nearby Lakewood, Ohio, Redmond came up through stock musicals and Broadway, where she understudied Judy Holliday in Bells Are Ringing and Angela Lansbury in the original Sweeney Todd. In the 1970s, a whole generation knew her as Sarah Tucker, the friendly country innkeeper in the Cool Whip commercials. Alfred Hitchcock cast her in Family Plot in 1976, and Woody Allen gave her a part in Manhattan Murder Mystery in 1993. She was married for a time to the actor Jack Weston.
Marge Redmond died on February 10, 2020, at the age of 95. No cause was made public, and her passing went unreported until May of that year, when, as TheWrap reported, it appeared in the in memoriam pages of the quarterly SAG-AFTRA magazine.
One more sister remains before we get to Sally, and she may have changed the course of Field’s entire career.
Is Madeleine Sherwood Still Alive?
As Reverend Mother Placido, the convent’s Mother Superior, Madeleine Sherwood spent three seasons trying to keep her airborne novice grounded. Viewers may not have realized how much stage history stood behind that stern habit.
Sherwood was born Madeleine Thornton in Montreal on November 13, 1922. She originated the role of Abigail in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible on Broadway in 1953, then played Mae, the scheming “Sister Woman,” in Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof on stage and in the 1958 film, and Miss Lucy in Sweet Bird of Youth on stage and on screen. She was blacklisted during the McCarthy era, and according to her Wikipedia biography she was arrested during a 1963 civil rights Freedom Walk in Gadsden, Alabama, and sentenced to six months of hard labor.
Her greatest gift to The Flying Nun may have happened off camera. Near the end of the first season, she noticed her young co-star was miserable. “She pulled me in the corner and she stuffed something in my hand,” Field told Bustle in 2022. “There’s an address there. It’s The Actors Studio. This Tuesday night, 8 o’clock, be there.” Field went, and she studied there with Lee Strasberg for years.
Madeleine Sherwood died on April 23, 2016, at her childhood home in Lac Cornu, Quebec, at age 93. She had retired in 1989 and gone home to Canada. No cause of death was released, and she was survived by her daughter, Chloe, two grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.
Is Sally Field Still Alive?
Yes, and she is having one of the best years of her life. Sally Field was born in Pasadena, California, on November 6, 1946, which makes her 80 years old today. She was only 18 when Gidget made her a star in 1965, and when that show was canceled after one season, ABC wanted to keep her on the air. She turned down The Flying Nun at first because she thought the idea was ridiculous, and she only reconsidered after her stepfather warned her about her future in the business.
She never pretended to love it. “When I was doing The Flying Nun, it was hugely difficult for me because I didn’t want to be doing it,” she told Bustle in 2022. “I was a joke.” Asked by Variety that same year how she got up every morning for a show she disliked, she answered, “It was a job,” and added, as Fox News reported, “I just had to put my head down and go to work and do the very best job I could.”
The hardest part came after the show ended. “I couldn’t get on the list. They thought they already knew what I was,” she told People in May 2026, according to TV Insider. Her years at the Actors Studio finally paid off when Jack Nicholson saw her work and recommended her for the 1976 film Stay Hungry. That same year she played a woman with 16 personalities in the TV movie Sybil, which won her an Emmy. She won the Best Actress Oscar for Norma Rae, then a second one for Places in the Heart, accepting it in 1985 with the famous line that people still quote back to her: “You like me!”
Then came Steel Magnolias, Forrest Gump and an Oscar nomination for Lincoln. In September, at 79, she set a new Emmy record, becoming the oldest winner ever for lead actress in a limited series or movie for playing a widow who befriends an octopus in Netflix’s Remarkably Bright Creatures. It was her fourth Emmy. Today’s milestone is a bittersweet one, because November 6 is also the anniversary of her mother’s death in 2011, a day we wrote about in the secret Sally Field kept from her mother for decades.
The young star who once called herself a joke stood on the Emmy stage in September, thanked the community she had belonged to for “62 years or something,” and spoke up for the people who make art. “With art, we matter,” she said, as Variety reported. “Our voices matter.” Sister Bertrille needed the wind to get off the ground. Sally Field found her own way up.
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