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Sally Field’s Moving Acceptance Speech: “Easy Is Overrated!”

Honored for her lifetime achievement at the SAG Awards, Sally Field gives a powerful speech that, this time, can't be ridiculed.

“I’ve flown on wires and surfed in the ocean, rode on horses in wagon trains and fast cars. I’ve had multiple personalities, worked in a textile mill, picked cotton. I’ve been Mrs. Doubtfire’s employer, Forrest Gump’s mother, Lincoln’s wife, and Spider-Man’s aunt.”

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In case anyone could forget, on February 26th Sally Field reminded us of the scope of her stupendous career while accepting her SAG-AFTRA Life Achievement Award in an elegant black taffeta dress.

The applause for Field was thunderous, and so was the gushing. “You evoke awe in every actor’s heart,” said Andrew Garfield, who presented the award. “You’re a north star for all of us.” Dolly Parton told Garfield: “I guess in this case, SAG stands for Sally Always Great.”

Field’s beaming smile projected the sense of “I did it!” Her triumph seemed genuinely lifetime earned.

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Surfing to Stardom

Field began her career in 1965 playing the peppy Malibu surfer-girl Gidget in the 1965 TV series adaptation of the novel of that name written by Frederick Kohner, based on the adventures of his daughter, Kathy Kohner Zuckerman: a feisty, tiny girl crashing the older all-male surfer aristocracy of Malibu. Zuckerman, now 83, wrote this in an email: “If anyone could/can, Ms. Field embodied ‘Gidget-like-can-do-ism.’ She was spunky and eager to get involved with the beach crew, with her high school newspaper and her peers.”

She worked her way up from ridicule to tremendous respect.

Field’s cute perkiness got her next cast as Elsie Ethrington, aka Sister Bertrille, the flying nun, in the 1967–1970 series of the same name. The character was, frankly, gently laugh worthy. Sister Bertrille wore a nun’s headdress that doubled as air-worthy propellers—and photos of Field in that role, given what she has become today, are startling in their almost cringe-worthy image of corny cuteness. That quality was something Field was encouraged to foment, but people were laughing at her, not with her: During one Golden Globes ceremony, Field actually “flew” across the ceiling of the packed award venue into the arms of John Wayne on the stage. (“What was I thinking?!” she marveled to Diane Sawyer, decades later, about the stunt.)

Yet she worked her way up from that ridicule to tremendous respect for her Oscar-winning performance as the textile-worker-turned-union-activist Norma Rae Webster in the 1979 film Norma Rae. And in 1985 she won her second Best Actress Oscar as the Depression-era farm widow Edna Spaulding in Places in the Heart.

Success Against the Odds

America loves success-against-odds stories. For men, this often means the triumph over addiction (see: Robert Downey Jr.) or over a rough and tumble, juvenile-delinquent-y past: think of ‘60s screen idol Steve McQueen—or, more recently, Mark Wahlberg. For women, this has meant besting a superficially awarded dismissiveness earned by being either droll-sexy (Cher winning the Golden Globe for Silkwood and the Oscar for Moonstruck) or by being cloyingly peppy.

She didn’t regret her Oscar speech, but she was embarrassed at the fallout.

That latter, of course, is Field. But while Cher intentionally played into her image by wearing a super-glam semi-bikini covered with mesh to pick up her Oscar in 1988, Field, in picking up her second Oscar, had her gosh-golly reputation wrongly—and sexistly—exaggerated by a runaway misquote. “You like me! You really like me!” was the way her remarks were widely rewritten. (Pause for a moment to consider if any man winning his second Best Actor Oscar would be made the target of ridicule.) In fact, what she’d really said that evening was compelling and dignified. After emotionally stating that receiving this second Oscar was a more impactful experience for her than the first one, she explained why: “I can’t deny the fact that you like me. Right now you like me.“ That’s earnest and charming and honest and grateful—not silly.

I interviewed Field for a cover story for long-departed McCalls magazine shortly after she won that second Oscar. She served me tea in the living room of her lovely, rambling home in the San Fernando Valley while her two sons—Peter and Eli Craig—from her early marriage to actor Steven Craig did their homework elsewhere in the house. She was immensely likable, and we’d laughed at our mutual past as high school cheerleaders—she at Birmingham High in Van Nuys, me at Beverly Hills High—during the same super-corny mid-1960s.

She’d also laughed at the notoriety that her Oscar comment had received. She didn’t regret it, but she was embarrassed at the fallout. “Oh, Lord,” I remember she’d said, “I didn’t think it would become so well known.” (Soon afterward she became more appropriately forceful. “Sometimes I want to punch them in the nose,” she told Variety, “mostly because they don’t ever [give] the context.”) She was involved with Burt Reynolds at the time—a deep relationship that would last until his death in 2018. And though she had spoken very positively of the relationship to me, she would later reveal it to have been “not without loving and caring, but really complicated and hurtful to me” and Reynolds to have been “controlling.”

“I Don’t Give Up without a Fight”

Despite the two Oscars, Field had to continue to fight for meaningful roles, but sometimes she found that the fighting and convincing was part of the process of coming to own the character. One of her next superb performances was that of Mary Todd Lincoln in Steven Spielberg ’s 2012 movie Lincoln. She’d let Spielberg know she would love to be Mary; still, a voice in her head said, “No, this isn’t going to happen,” and what she called her “negative self-fulfilling prophecy” took over.

When Spielberg informed her that she wouldn’t work out as Mary Todd Lincoln, she doubled down.

The negativity increased when she found out that Daniel Day-Lewis was cast as Lincoln. Their ages didn’t work out; Abraham Lincoln was 10 years older than Mary, but she, Field, then 58, was 10 years older than Day-Lewis. Still, “I don’t give up without a fight,” she told Oprah, and when Spielberg informed her that she wouldn’t work out as Mary, she doubled down, deeply researched Todd Lincoln’s life, and insisted on a screen test. Hours later Spielberg called her on her cell when she was driving home: He’d been blown away; she had the role.

The performance, for which she gained 20 pounds by eating junk food, was extraordinary. She expertly conveyed the emotionality and the values of the tormented, staunchly pro-emancipation woman. With it she won her third Oscar, this one for Best Supporting Actress. She has also won a second Golden Globe, three Primetime Emmys, and nominations for a Tony and two BAFTA Awards. As well, she was a 2019 Kennedy Center awardee.

Climbing out of the Box

So when Field bounded up to the stage to accept her SAG Award last month, she did so as one of America’s most distinguished actresses. “Oh, Lord in Heaven!” she said with sublime and characteristic modestly, surveying the audience. “Actors all! Standing on their feet! Oh, gosh!”

She spoke of how she “first found the stage when [she] was 12 years old in the seventh grade—and after that [she] never left the drama department . . . On stage was the one place [she] could be really [herself].” She’d continued: “When I got off stage, I was shy and careful and hidden . . . but on stage I would surprise myself . . . It’s always been about finding those precious moments when I felt suddenly, utterly—sometimes dangerously—alive. So the task has been to always get to that—to get to the work: to claw my way, if necessary.”

Acting has always been about finding those precious moments when I felt suddenly, utterly—sometimes dangerously—alive.

The clawing started in earnest during her time as the flying nun. She suffered depression during her years playing  Sister Bertrille. She hated the role but got up every morning to play it because, she told Fox News, “It was a job.” The far more serious reason for the depression was the residue from the sustained sexual abuse that had been visited upon her during her childhood by her stepfather, towering, strong charismatic actor and stuntman Jock Mahoney. “It would have been so much easier if I’d only felt one thing,” she wrote in her 2018 memoir, In Pieces. “If Jock had been nothing but cruel and frightening. But he wasn’t. He could be magical, the Pied Piper with our family as his entrenched followers.”

Field conquered her depression by enrolling in Lee Strasberg’s Actors’ Studio and using the tough love meted out by the penultimate acting teacher to power her insistence upon becoming a serious actor. And so, decades past the abuse and the silly role and the ridicule for it, and the depression, and the complicated relationship with Reynolds, she stood at the microphone at the SAG Awards and surveyed the admirably inclusive audience.

She recalled “struggling to climb [her] way out of the box of situation comedy in the ’60s and ’70s with a fierceness [she] didn’t know [she] had.” She said: “But honestly, I was a little white girl with a pug nose born in Pasadena, California. And when I look around this room today, I know that my fight, as hard as it was, was lightweight compared to some of yours. I thank you, and I applaud you, and I know for you, like for me, it has not been easy.”

Then she took a breath and said: “You know what? Easy is overrated.” Indeed.

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By Sheila Weller

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