“Things I Never Thought I Wanted To Say Out Loud”​​​​​​​ - Sally Field

She’s one of Hollywood’s most intuitive actors, but behind the brilliant career was a woman in pieces. Now the 71-year-old wants to lift the lid on the painful childhood that still haunts her, and in an extraordinary interview in her LA home talks to Juliet Rieden about the raw, intimate and explosive memoir she knew she had to write.

- Juliet Rieden

It takes courage to face demons, dark truths buried so deep you dare not speak their name and let them out into the light for all to see. For Sally Field, one of Hollywood’s most admired and well-known actors, double Oscar and triple Emmy winner, such a venture is frankly Herculean. And yet as I sit in the soothing peace and quiet of her sun-drenched Los Angeles home, high up in the hills and canyons overlooking the impeccably blue Pacific, I sense a weight has been lifted from Sally’s tiny shoulders. At 71, the mother of three and grandmother of five feels an urgent need to pull the multifarious pieces of her life together and it’s a journey which started seven years ago.

It was Sally’s 65th birthday when her mother, vivacious actress Margaret Field, whom Sally has always called Baa – “probably because [Sally’s elder brother] Ricky did” – died. She was 89, had been ill for some while and Sally was heartbroken. Mother and daughter were incredibly close, a bond that dictated both women’s lives and not always in a good way.

As a child, Sally craved the sparkle that was her mother. “It literally was like a jolt of electricity going through you that lifted you off the ground. I felt so intoxicated with her presence. I was just joyful that she was in the room with me,” explains Sally. But when Margaret remarried and the controlling professional stuntman and actor Jock Mahoney turned family dynamics upside down, Sally lost her mum for decades as she faded into an alcoholic haze.

In the months before Baa’s death, Sally nursed her mother and one evening summoned the nerve to seize the moment and broach deep-seated family secrets she desperately needed exorcised. Sally achieved some resolution – “Mum handled it magnificently”, she tells me – but having let her mother go, she now had to make peace with herself.