This story first appeared in the Nov. 27 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
Sally Field and The Hollywood Reporter go back a ways together. In its 1965 review of ABC’s Gidget, THR said the surfer-girl comedy “intros a brisk fledgling in Sally Field.” A year later, when she was 19, it announced her first film role in The Way West. (Kirk Douglas leads a wagon train to Oregon, Field falls in love with another young settler who accidently kills an Indian chief ’s son, and Douglas has to hang him to keep the Indians happy.)
And in 1967, when she starred in ABC’s The Flying Nun — playing a 90-pound sister who achieves liftoff thanks to heavy winds and her massive cornette — THR said she was “winsome and credible as the navigating novice, her timing and mugging timed for unerringly strong effects.” (THR also declared the sitcom, which ran until 1970, “the TV season’s first unqualified hit.”)
Other mentions, like when she won a couple of Oscars (one in 1980 for Norma Rae, and another in 1985 for Places in the Heart), came later. But she never was a consistent THR reader. “I knew enough to stay away from everything that could potentially make me crazy,” says Field, 69. “It was instinctual. In the show-business family I grew up in, everybody was always looking for their next job. You didn’t spend a lot of time looking at the trades and seeing other people having jobs and you didn’t.”
But Field occasionally will read the publication’s current incarnation, now celebrating its fifth birthday. “The new Hollywood Reporter comes to my house. It does look good; it’s beautifully done, and I sometimes find myself sucked in. My sons read it. They go over every page.”
Related Stories
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7qbvLpbCwp5%2BZv6a8zqurnqpemLyue8uinZ6rpK65pnvLop2eq6SuuaZ5zZ6urGdhboN4edKao6WxXZu2prjDZq6aq12ovbDA056bZnBkZYV6hI4%3D