Sally Field Interview (page: 2 / 8) Two Oscars for Best Actress	Print Interview

Did you get cast in Gidget during high school?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Sally Field: I had just graduated. It was that summer of 1964. I had just graduated from high school and had no idea what I was going to do. And no, my parents didn't say, "Sal, maybe you ought to be taking SATs and going to college"? It was like what...I sometimes think if I hadn't said, "Hmm," that I would've just drifted off and they wouldn't have basically noticed. "What happened to that girl that used to live here?" I had never been out of the state, I had never been on an airplane. I was so incredibly naïve and unsophisticated. I didn't know that what I really wanted was to go to New York and study acting, didn't know that it really existed. I knew New York was there, but I didn't know about the Actor's Studio. Even though my mother loved acting -- that's a whole 'nother story. She sort of so focused on being married to who she was married to. She lost a lot of her own voice, I think, is the truth.

That happens sometimes with stepfathers.

Sally Field: A lot. So I didn't know where it was. I didn't own the information of the kind of actor I wanted to be.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I said I needed to go and act somewhere in the summertime, because that was what I did all day long. My stepfather had heard of some workshop that was located at Columbia Pictures, and it was just using the facilities at night. And so I went and auditioned. You had to audition. I auditioned with my mother, with a scene from Toys in the Attic, which must've been beyond dreadful. But I got into the workshop, and then I realized that the people who auditioned you were actually casting people from television. And the first night I went to the workshop, the casting man from Screen Gems came out, introduced himself, and asked me if I'd come on an interview the next day. And that interview that I went on -- completely naïve. All the other girls had eight by ten glossies and agents. I had a wallet full of pictures of my friends.

Did he see you act?

Sally Field: He'd seen me in an audition with my mother, right out of high school. He asked me to come on the audition.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I went on the audition -- auditioned. I'd never been...I mean I didn't know what do to. I came back, I came back, I came back, I came back, I came back, I came back, which seemed like forever. And at the end of the summer, I was doing a television series called Gidget. Yeah, and I was 17. So bam! You know, just into it, just flop into the world!

[ Key to Success ] Perseverance

You've spoken in previous interviews about conflicted feelings you had about your stepfather. He was kind of a fearsome person. Can you address that?

Sally Field: He was a terrorizing person. He was a very charismatic person. In my now 60-some odd years, I think he's been the biggest source of conflict, as a person, in my life, in trying to sort out what my feelings really were. He destroyed a lot of good things about his children -- his stepchildren and his own children. Oddly enough, I think I owe a great deal to how difficult he was.

What made him difficult?

Sally Field: Boy, it's almost impossible to say right here. He was very aggressive. He could be incredibly tyrannical. But I think, as a child, the biggest, most damaging part of him is that he loved to humiliate. He loved to pick you apart and deeply humiliate you. I don't really know why. I think he thought he was parenting. I'm not really sure. I was the one that stood up. I was the one that wouldn't take it. I was the one that fought for my brother, for whatever reason. Then, for other reasons that will go in the book, I became a focus of his tyranny. I was terrified. I was terrified all the time. I was terrified asleep, I was terrified awake, I was just terrified that I would be forced to fight, and yet I did. Something in me wouldn't be quieted. He was a very big man, almost six-five, and very handsome and charismatic in his way.

Wasn't he a prominent stuntman?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Sally Field: He was probably one of the finest stuntmen that ever lived, athletically gifted beyond belief, and a gorgeous male. He would say to me, as this little 15-year-old girl, pointing at me in this big threatening fashion, that he had this magic to identify everyone's Achilles heel, and I was like, "Wow! What is that?" And that is to identify where it is you had this deep flaw. And if he were able to tell you what that deep personal flaw was, it would destroy you, because you wouldn't be able to handle that truth. And I remember sitting there hearing that at 15, going, "Bullshit." Part of me when -- first of all, I'm not going to believe that. Second of all, could it possibly be true? Could there be something about me that I don't see that's so horrifying that I don't want to know, that if he told me, it would destroy me? And I think what it did is it made me so that every flaw that I had -- every weakness I had, every part of me that I didn't want to see -- it was going to be what I rode in with first. No one was going to be able to say anything to me that I didn't already know and accept about myself. So, I think a lot of the things that were damaging to maybe my brother, ultimately turned out for me to be the fight, the part of me that just simply wouldn't sit still. Even to this day, I have to watch myself. If someone says something that triggers me I'll come flaring up in this way that I don't want to be that person. That's not what I want to be. But it triggers this old language that I had of survival and I have used it in my acting. It is my anger, my fury, my deep resentment at being manipulated like that. I have learned to own it, to use it to propel me. And I think some of my siblings, it really was damaging.

[ Key to Success ] Courage

Do you know where that strength came from?

Sally Field: I don't really know, except that I was the second child and I adored my brother. My older brother I worshipped. He was the sun and the moon and the stars. If he played with me that day, I was like, "Oh my God, I had such a good day!" And I think that early on in our lives, if something happened to him, I didn't care what happened to me. I would just kill them. And I think a lot of my ability to jump on the table and fight with my stepfather came from the fact that he was hurting my brother. I think it was probably a very female thing, and in a lot of ways, maybe it comes from the fact that I was female.

When were you able to leave home?

Sally Field: I left home as soon as I could. I started to earn a living when I was 17, and I think I left home just as I turned 18.

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