Sally fields death biography sample

The first thing Sally Field and I talk about, as we settle into her Pacific Palisades home on a hot August afternoon, is my mother.

Field's memoir In Pieces (publishing Tuesday) is anchored by the loving, troubled, deeply complicated relationship she had with her mother, Margaret (Field calls her "Baa"), over the course of her life. She recounts a traumatic childhood: Her stepfather, Jock Mahoney, sexually abused her, and her home life gradually fell apart as she charted her own path and embarked on a Hollywood career. In adulthood, Field's relationship with her mother was defined by physical closeness and dependability, but also an unspokenness — a pain — manifested in sporadic bursts of anger. The emotional release only came just before Margaret's death, in 2011, when she revealed to her daughter that she knew of an instance of Jock's predatory behavior. "For years and years my mother had known," Field writes of her thinking then. The moment is devastating, but it ends with the pair in an embrace, with a new understanding. However incomplete.

The book, I tell her, made me think about the unspokenness between my mother and her mother; the flashes of anger, the struggle to communicate. Field beams with empathetic recognition. "They're from my generation, right?" she asks, warmly. "We grew up, as our mothers' generation grew up, with these certain boundaries that are hard to break through. But it's important. We all have to get to someplace else, I think. It's hard. It's really, really hard."

Getting to that "someplace else" is a strong description of the seven-year journey Field, 71, took with In Pieces. "I had, at the end of my mother's life, these very conversations that you're talking about, that [needed] to go down before it was too late," she says. "But even then, when she passed away, something in me

PERSONAL

Full name, Sally Margaret Field; born November 6, 1946, in Pasadena, CA; daughter of Richard Dryden Field (in sales) and Maggie Field Mahoney (an actress); stepdaughter of Jock Mahoney (a stunt performer and actor); married Steve Craig, September, 1968 (a contractor; divorced, 1975); married Alan Greisman (a film producer and film executive), December, 1984 (divorced, 1994); children: (first marriage) Peter Craig (a novelist), Elijah Craig (an actor); (second marriage) Samuel H. Greisman. Education: Attended Actors Studio, 1968 and 1973–75; studied acting with David Craig.

Addresses:Agent—Creative Artists Agency, 9830 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, CA 90212. Contact—P.O. Box 492417, Los Angeles, CA 90049. Publicist—PMK/HBH Public Relations, 8500 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 700, Beverly Hills, CA 90211.

Career: Actress, producer, director, and writer. Fogwood Films, Ltd., producer, beginning in 1984. Appeared in commercials.

Member: Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists.

Awards, Honors: Emmy Award, outstanding lead actress in a drama or comedy special, 1976, for "Sybil," The Big Event; Golden Globe Award nomination, best motion picture actress in a comedy or musical, 1978, for Smokey and the Bandit; Academy Award, best actress, Golden Globe Award, Hollywood Foreign Press Association, best actress in a dramatic film, New York Film Critics Award, Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award, National Board of Review Award, Cannes International Film Festival, and National Society of Film Critics Award, all best actress, all 1979, and Marquee Award, American Movie awards, best actress, 1980, all for Norma Rae; Star of the Year Award, National Association of Theatre Owners, 1981; Golden Globe Award nomination, best motion picture actress in a drama, 1982, for Absence of Malice; Marquee Award, favorite star—female, 1982; People's Choice Award (with Jane Fonda), favorite motion pictu

To the public, Sally Field is Gidget and the Flying Nun. She’s union organizer Norma Rae. She’s the occasionally single, usually exasperated mother in Steel Magnolias,Mrs. Doubtfire, and Forrest Gump. She famously proclaimed, “I can’t deny the fact that you like me, right now, you like me!” while accepting an Oscar for Places in the Heart. Field has remained a relatively wholesome and wholly American star, but in a new interview with The New York Times, she spoke about her new memoir, In Pieces—and the stories in it that will complicate that first descriptor, stories that are heartbreakingly in line with what it has meant to be a woman, and particularly one in Hollywood.

As the Times reveals, Field writes extensively about the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of her stepfather, which continued until she turned 14. (She first spoke publicly about it in 2012.) Her mother married Jock Mahoney, a stuntman and actor who went by Jocko, in 1952 when Field was about five. As she writes in her memoir, “It would have been so much easier if I’d only felt one thing, if Jocko had been nothing but cruel and frightening. But he wasn’t. He could be magical, the Pied Piper with our family as his entranced followers.” (Mahoney died in 1989, and divorced her mother almost two decades prior.) She writes about an abortion in Tijuana at 17, and about compromising situations she found herself in with certain men in the industry (with some denying the stories she tells).

Field later dated the late Burt Reynolds, who starred with her in Smokey and the Bandit, and who died just last week. Field told the Times that she saw her romance with Reynolds as a means of re-creating her relationship with Mahoney. “I was somehow exorcising something that needed to be exorcised,” she said. “I was trying to make it work this time.”

She writes about Reynolds’s prescription drug use and his controlling nature, and said that one salve to his death is that he won’t get the opp

Sally Field is a proud mom to her sons: Peter, Eli and Sam.

Over the years, The Flying Nun star has spoken about her love for her children. In a speech at the 2012 Human Rights Campaign annual national dinner, Field said, "The three things I am most proud of in my life are Peter, Eli and Sam. My sons."

The Oscar winner added, "They are kind and loving, productive human beings. Each very different from the other."

Field shares her elder sons, Peter and Eli, with her first husband, Steven Craig, and her youngest, Sam, with her second husband, Alan Greisman.

Sally Field's Life in Photos

The Forrest Gump actress was in her early 20s when she became a mom for the first time. Field told PEOPLE in 2023 that she apologized to her older sons for being a "young parent" while also recognizing how they motivated her.

"I had two little kids to take care of," she said, "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."

Field added, "More times than not, they literally picked me up when I just felt crushed."

Here is everything to know about Sally Field's sons: Peter, Eli and Sam.

Peter Craig, 55

Field and her then-husband Steven welcomed their first child, son Peter, on Nov. 10, 1969.

"The very end of the second year of [The Flying] Nun, before the third even began, I was pregnant with my first child," Field told PEOPLE in 2016, noting that her focus at the time was on "what was happening inside of" her.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Peter was shuttled between his mom's movie sets and his dad's commune during his childhood. When he was 28, Peter admitted to Entertainment Weekly that he knew early on that his "mother wasn't like other moms" and that his father "wasn't really like other dads."

Peter s