Sally Field, 79, has revealed that Jack Nicholson quietly rescued her from Hollywood obscurity in the mid-1970s, recommending her for the film role that broke her typecasting after three seasons on The Flying Nun had made her all but unemployable in serious drama.
Speaking to People magazine to promote her new Netflix film Remarkably Bright Creatures, Field described the years following the ABC fantasy sitcom — which ran from 1967 to 1970 — as a period of near-total professional shutdown. “I couldn’t get in a room to audition. I couldn’t get on the list. They thought they already knew what I was,” she said. “‘No, thanks. We don’t want any of that.'”
Rather than fight the industry’s assumptions head-on, Field adopted a different strategy. “I had to say to myself that if I wasn’t where I wanted to be, I had to get better,” she told People. “Hollywood may be rotten and unfair, but it had to be that it was on me to make it different. I felt if I wasn’t doing that, then I was just handing them all the power.”
She enrolled at the Actors Studio in Los Angeles, training under the legendary Lee Strasberg alongside a roster of working actors that included Nicholson, now 89. “Everybody used to come. It was packed. You couldn’t get in,” she recalled. Nicholson, watching her work with Strasberg, passed her name to director Bob Rafelson and the late casting director Dianne Crittenden, calling Field an “undiscovered talent.”
The referral produced her first real audition since the 1965 sitcom Gidget — for Stay Hungry, Rafelson’s 1976 comedy-drama opposite Jeff Bridges and a then-unknown Arnold Schwarzenegger. “So in some weird way, my theory was right,” Field said. “I worked at the Actors Studio for so long — and it was so hard — that Jack had seen it and the word spread.”
The same year Stay Hungry released, Field won an Emmy for the miniseries Sybil. From there, the transformation was swift: Smokey and the Bandit, Norma Rae — her first Oscar — and Places in the Heart, which brought her second. The audition, however, carried a darker footnote.
In her 2018 autobiography, Field wrote that Rafelson asked her to remove her top during the process, citing a nude scene in the film. “Ignoring the sharp jab of emotion that shot through me, I removed my shirt as casually as he had made the request, then sat for his approval with my eyes closed,” she wrote.
Remarkably Bright Creatures, her new Netflix drama, became a streaming hit within 24 hours of its release. Directed by Olivia Newman and based on Shelby Van Pelt’s bestselling novel, the film casts Field as a widow who bonds with a grumpy octopus at an aquarium — a character she says she committed to after reading just two chapters of the book in galleys.
