Sally Field - You Just Do The Best With What You've Got – And Sometimes Magic Strikes

Despite a traumatic childhood, she’s had huge success, and today the two-time Oscar-winning actress is also proving to be a very modern hero for women in a post #MeToo era.

- Michelle Davies

It was 1959 and the seventh-grade students at Birmingham High School in San Fernando, California, were acting out scenes from a play in their drama class. Finally, it was 13-year-old Sally Field’s turn. Despite her armpits ‘sweating so much they dripped’, she delivered her line with conviction – and in doing so found her purpose. ‘I wasn’t good, I knew I wasn’t,’ she said, ‘but it didn’t matter… for one moment I felt free.’

From then on, Field set her heart on acting. ‘She was a drama student with the passion to become the best she could,’ Louis Ramirez, one of her teachers, later recalled. It was therefore of little surprise to her peers when, a mere four years after her classroom debut, Field landed the lead role in Gidget, a TV sitcom created especially for her.

Almost six decades on, Field, now 72, is one of the most venerated stars of film (Forrest Gump, Mrs Doubtfire, Lincoln) and television (ER, Brothers & Sisters), and a two time Best Actress Oscar winner. Yet it is her writing for which she is presently being acclaimed. Last September, Field published her biography, In Pieces, in which she detailed with unflinching candour the childhood abuse she suffered at the hands of her stepfather and the exploitation she experienced as a young actor – a timely theme in this post #MeToo era of transparency. Taking six years to write, and a much darker confessional than your usual showbiz memoir fare, the book sent shock waves around the industry. ‘People should tell whatever story they want to tell,’ has been her response to the widespread reaction. ‘This is just my story and it happened the way it happened.’