And I also said we were a perfect um match of flaws. Right. >> Um we went together very well, but not necessarily for the right reasons. Um we just both of us felt and For decades, Sally Field captured the hearts of audiences with her warmth, her fearless talent, and a smile that felt like sunshine breaking through the clouds.
But behind those unforgettable performances and the famous Oscar speech that echoed through Hollywood history lay a deeply personal story of pain, survival, and a love that was far more complicated than anyone outside those closed doors ever knew. From a childhood marked by darkness to a romance with one of the biggest stars in the world, Sally kept so much locked away until the day she finally decided to tell it all in her own words.
Who was the man who left the deepest mark on her heart? And why did their story end the way it did? You probably know Sally Field as one of the most beloved actresses America has ever produced, right? That girl next door with the big eyes and the even bigger talent. The one who stood up on that Oscar stage and said those words, “You like me. You really like me.
” A line that became one of the most quoted moments in Academy Awards history. But long before Hollywood knew her name, Sally Margaret Field was just a little girl growing up in Pasadena, California. Born on November 6th, 1946 to actress Margaret Field and her husband Richard Dryden Field, life at home wasn’t the picture of stability you might imagine for a future star.
Her parents divorced when she was just 4 years old, and that early fracture left a mark that never fully healed. Her mother eventually remarried a Hollywood stuntman named Jock Mahoney, a man who went by the nickname Jacko. On the outside, he was magnetic, charming, the kind of man who could make a whole room light up.
But behind closed doors, things were very different. Sally has since revealed that the abuse began when she was only 5 years old and continued until she was 14. It was the kind of wound that doesn’t just disappear. It seeps into everything. How you see yourself, how you love, how you survive. She found one thing that gave her somewhere to go, acting.
Losing herself in a character meant she didn’t have to be herself for a little while. And in that escape, she found her purpose. She attended Birmingham High School in Van Nuys, where she was a cheerleader. After graduation, Sally enrolled in a summer acting workshop at Columbia Studios, and that one decision changed everything.
A casting agent spotted her and invited her to audition for a new television series called Gidget. She was called back again and again, eventually chosen from over 75 other young actresses to play the title role. At just 17 years old, she was the star of a primetime network television series. Not bad for a girl from Pasadena.
But Gidget was canceled after only one season. The ratings just weren’t there. Still, the door had cracked open just enough, and Sally pushed through it. Next came The Flying Nun, a show about a young novice whose oversized habit allowed her to catch the wind and literally fly. Yes, it sounds exactly as unusual as it was.
And Sally has talked openly about how much the role embarrassed her in later years. She wanted to be taken seriously as an actress, and here she was floating through the air on a television set. But even that strange chapter served a purpose. It kept her working, kept her visible, and kept her name in the conversation.
There was something burning inside Sally, a hunger to do something real, something that mattered. And that hunger was about to drive every decision she made next. By the early 1970s, Sally had already been married to her high school sweetheart, Steven Craig. The two wed in 1968 and had two sons together, Peter Craig, who would grow up to become a novelist and screenwriter, and Eli Craig, who followed his parents into the film world as an actor and director.
But the marriage didn’t hold, and they separated in 1973, officially divorcing 2 years later. Sally was a single mother in her late 20s trying to find work in a Hollywood that still didn’t quite know what to do with her. She wanted more than sitcoms, more than the perky, cheerful roles that had defined her early career.
So she did something brave. She walked into the Actors Studio in New York and spent 2 years studying under Lee Strasberg, one of the most legendary acting teachers of his era. It was here that something cracked open inside her. She stopped performing and started feeling. The difference between the two turned out to be everything.
Then came a role that stopped everyone in their tracks. In 1976, Sally starred in the television film Sybil playing a woman with 16 distinct personalities. It was an astonishing performance, raw, complex, demanding, and unforgettable. She won an Emmy Award for it, and suddenly Hollywood had no choice but to pay attention.
And then one day in 1977, the phone rang. It was Burt Reynolds. Now let’s talk about Burt Reynolds for a moment because in 1977, Burt Reynolds was not just a movie star, he was the movie star. He was on the cover of Cosmopolitan. He was the number one box office draw in America for five straight years. He was the kind of man who walked into a room and the room rearranged itself around him, and he wanted Sally Field for his new film Smokey and the Bandit.
The filmmakers weren’t so sure about the choice. Sally herself couldn’t quite figure out why he was calling her for the role. And then he explained. He had always loved her in Gidget, back when she was that bright young girl catching the wind on television, and he wanted her sitting beside him for the whole movie.
She later joked that was exactly the reason she took the part. When they arrived on set, something happened between them that neither of them had a word for yet. Sally described it as instantaneous and intense. They had known each other maybe 3 or 4 days, and it already felt like 4 years.
The chemistry between them leapt off the screen. Audiences felt it. Critics felt it. And the film became a massive hit grossing over $300 worldwide on a budget of barely $4 million. But what caught was only the beginning of the story. Off screen, they fell into each other, and the rest of the world seemed very far away.
Smokey and the Bandit was a phenomenon, and Sally was at the center of it all. But even as the film was still playing in theaters, the complicated reality of being with Burt Reynolds was already beginning to take shape. Here is what people on the outside saw, a gorgeous couple at the top of the world, two stars in love making hit movies together.
What people didn’t see was the way the weight of Burt’s stardom had turned into something he used to control everyone around him. Sally wrote about it years later in her memoir saying that from the moment she walked through the door, it became a way to control her, too. She described it as falling blindly into a rut that had long ago formed in her road, a pre-programmed behavior rooted so deep in her childhood that she couldn’t even see it happening.
She had grown up learning that to be loved, you had to disappear. And so she disappeared. She dressed for Burt, looked for him, walked for him. The actress who had fought so hard to find her own voice began to go quiet again. She has said plainly that she stopped existing during those years. There were things she couldn’t ignore even in those early months on the set of Smokey and the Bandit.
She encountered his drug use firsthand. He was taking Percodan, Valium, barbiturates to manage whatever was raging inside of him, and she found herself handing him pills while he drove cars down narrow roads at full speed. It was a window into who he really was beneath all that swagger, a man who was struggling to hold himself together and using his stardom to hold everything else in its place.
Still, she stayed because the connection between them was real. There was love in it. There was passion and there was a care that went deep even if the shape that care took was sometimes painful to carry. In 1979, something happened that would prove to be a turning point in their relationship. Sally was offered the starring role in Norma Rae, the story of a cotton mill worker in the South who becomes a union organizer.
It was the kind of role that comes along once in a career, a real woman fighting for something real and Sally knew immediately she had to do it. But Burt did not want her to take it. He had made up his mind about what kind of woman Sally should be and a union organizer in a southern mill wasn’t it.
He apparently told her point-blank that no lady of his was going to play a And when she tried to explain that it was acting, that it was a character, he told her she was letting her ambition get the better of her. He tried to convince her to skip the Cannes Film Festival when the film was selected to premiere there, telling her, “You don’t think you’re going to win anything, do you?” Sally went to Cannes anyway and she won best actress.
On the final day of filming Norma Rae, Burt actually showed up on set and got down on one knee with a diamond ring. It was a proposal that Sally described as feeling completely wrong, something that wasn’t her and she didn’t accept it. When the Academy Award nominations were announced and Sally was in the running for best actress, Burt was not happy and he was not going to go with her as her date to the ceremony.
The man who had done so much to put her in front of the cameras in the first place, the man she loved, couldn’t bring himself to celebrate what she had accomplished. Sally went to the Oscars that night without him, picked up by actor David Steinberg and his wife, and she stood on that stage and picked up her very first Academy Award for Norma Rae without Burt Reynolds anywhere in the building.
That was a moment that told her everything she needed to know even if she wasn’t quite ready to act on it yet. There is something important to understand about why Sally stayed as long as she did and why she fell so deeply into this relationship in the first place. She has spoken about how her childhood prepared her for exactly this kind of dynamic.
She grew up learning that love came with conditions, that the man in the house could be magical and frightening all at once, that you navigated by making yourself smaller and smaller until you disappeared completely. Jock Mahoney had done that to her and she had learned those lessons so thoroughly that when she met a man who needed the same thing, she walked straight toward it as if following a map drawn in her very bones.
She said it herself, “I was somehow exercising something that needed to be exercised. I was trying to make it work this time and Burt was the arena in which she tried to do it.” They co-starred in four films together, Smokey and the Bandit, Hooper, The End and Smokey and the Bandit II.
And through all of it, their personal story kept running alongside the professional one, full of lust and codependency and a love that was real even when it was harmful. Burt proposed multiple times over the years and Sally never said yes. She knew, even when she couldn’t fully explain it, that his heart wasn’t truly in it the way it needed to be, that if they had married, they would have ended up feeling terrible. He wanted children.
He talked about it. He ached for it and yet his fear of that very thing was always just a little stronger than the want. By 1980, their relationship had officially ended though they would drift back toward each other on and off until 1982 when the break became permanent. Sally found out about his infidelities through tabloids and newspaper clippings.
Her grandmother was actually mailing them to her, clippings of Burt with other women. The humiliation of that was something Sally has never quite forgotten. “Part of [clears throat] me knew it was all true,” she said. “I felt duped and a fool.” And yet even as she walked away from Burt Reynolds, she walked directly into the most productive years of her professional life as if the release of that relationship had freed something inside of her.
In 1984, she was back on that Oscar stage for a second time having won best actress for Places in the Heart, a depression-era drama in which she played a Texas widow fighting to hold her family’s farm together. And this time when she gave her speech, she said the words that have echoed through pop culture ever since, “You like me. You really like me.
” It became a punchline for some but for anyone who understood who Sally was and what she had been through, it was something much more honest than a punchline. It was a woman who had spent her whole life feeling like she had to shrink herself to be loved finally hearing that the world liked exactly who she was.
That same year, she married producer Alan Greisman and they went on to have one son together, Samuel, born in 1987. The marriage lasted 10 years before they divorced in 1994 and by then, Sally had become one of the most versatile actresses in Hollywood. She was the grieving mother in Steel Magnolias in 1989 alongside Dolly Parton, Shirley MacLaine, Daryl Hannah, Olympia Dukakis and a young Julia Roberts.
She played Robin Williams’ estranged wife in Mrs. Doubtfire in 1993 and she was Tom Hanks’ mother in the massive 1994 blockbuster Forrest Gump, a role that required her to play a young woman and an elderly woman across the span of one man’s whole life. She was only 10 years older than Hanks in real life and she made every moment of it completely believable.
Throughout all of this, Burt Reynolds was living his own life. He married actress Loni Anderson in 1988 and they had a child together but that marriage eventually fell apart amid allegations of physical abuse and drug use on both sides. They divorced in 1994, the same year Sally and Alan Greisman parted ways and Burt was left alone with whatever it was he hadn’t been able to fix in himself.
In interviews over the years, Burt kept returning to Sally, kept circling back to what they had and what he had done with it. He called her the love of his life in his 2015 memoir and in interview after interview in his later years, he said that losing her was the biggest mistake of his life. “Even now, it’s hard on me,” he told Vanity Fair. “I don’t know why I was so stupid.
Men are like that, you know. You find the perfect person and then you do everything you can to screw it up.” Sally has never quite seen their story the same way. She was always touched when he said those things but she has been honest about the fact that she believed he had reinvented their relationship in his own memory over the decades, turned her into something she may not have been simply because he wanted the thing he didn’t have.
She hadn’t spoken to him for the last 30 years of his life and she knew the distance was the right thing even when the nostalgia hurt. On September 6th, 2018, Burt Reynolds died of a heart attack at a hospital in Florida. He was 82 years old. 12 days later on September 18th, Sally’s memoir In Pieces arrived on bookstore shelves.
It was a timing so close it felt almost impossible. The book she had spent six years writing, the book in which she laid bare everything about her childhood, about the abuse, about the patterns she had fallen into, about Burt, landed in the world just days after he left it. Sally told The New York Times that she had felt glad in those first moments after hearing about his death.
Glad that he wasn’t going to read it. Glad that he wasn’t going to be asked about it, and wasn’t going to have to defend himself or lash out, which he probably would have. I did not want to hurt him any further, she said. But she also released a statement, and the words in that statement were as honest as anything she has ever said.
She wrote, There are times in your life that are so indelible, they never fade away. They stay alive even 40 years later. My years with Burt never leave my mind. He will be in my history and my heart for as long as I live. Rest, buddy. That one word, buddy, his childhood nickname, said more than any long speech could have done. It told you that underneath all of it, underneath the pain and the control and the years of silence, there was something that had been real between them. Something she was still carrying.
Today Sally Field is in her late 70s, and she has kept working with a kind of commitment that tells you acting was never just a career for her. It was the thing that saved her. She earned a Tony Award nomination on Broadway for her performance in a revival of Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie in 2017.
She received the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award in 2023, and the Kennedy Center Honor in 2019, two of the highest recognitions American culture can offer an artist. Burt Reynolds died still regretting Sally Field, and Sally Field survived him with the quiet grace that only comes from having done the hard internal work of understanding where your wounds come from and choosing to walk forward anyway. Their story is not a fairy tale.
It never was. It is something more complicated and more true than that. It is the story of two people with real flaws and real feelings who found each other at a moment when both of them were still being shaped by things they didn’t fully understand yet. It is the story of a woman who learned that love should not cost you yourself, and who had to lose herself completely before she understood that.
And it is the story of a man who recognized what he had only after it was gone and spent 30 years talking about it to anyone who would listen because he could never bring himself to just pick up the phone. If this story moved you, don’t forget to like this video, subscribe to the channel, and hit that notification bell so you never miss a story like this.
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