Sally Field Interview (page: 3 / 8) Two Oscars for Best Actress	Print Interview

So could you have anticipated when you took the role of Gidget what a cultural phenomenon it would be?

Sally Field: I didn't have the maturity to be able to think like that, I was so new. Boy, I was pushing my envelope! You've heard from a lot of people who started companies very young. In some ways that was me.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I was too young to know that I should be desperately, deeply, profoundly frightened. I was just too young to know that what I was doing couldn't...it was going to destroy me. And I just kind of blithely went along, because it's what I had done in high school to survive, and I was really good at that. I was really good in high school, so surely I was really good here, and didn't know to be as terrified as I probably should've been. I knew that Gidget was a character I loved. I had watched the movies with Sandra Dee, and oh my gosh, it was so great. Gee whiz, I wanted to be that. She was so cute and gosh...so I was simply lost in that. I was simply lost in the amazing fun. I got to do that, and couldn't really incorporate in my head the magnitude, in that it was going to reach millions and millions of people. But something in me had some kind of strength, that I don't know how or why. I don't know why, except that I had this gift early on. I had a gift and it held me, this little sparkling gift that I had when I left my body. It held me safe. It said, "I'll be with you, you'll be fine, you'll come home to us and you'll be fine." And it's always been there.

[ Key to Success ] Courage

What was it like, playing Gidget? She was really an icon for young girls.

Sally Field: I didn't ever think of that. I'm sure she was an icon to me.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I think the most important thing in Gidget is that she had a father. I think it was this really turning point for me because I got to play a girl who had a father, and I didn't have one. It was Don Porter, who was the most lovely, lovely, lovely loving man. And he was so terribly supportive to me in my awkwardness, in my newness. I didn't read very well, because I realize now, I am like slightly dyslexic in a way, especially when I get nervous. We would do readings once a week for a while -- when we had time -- of the script. We'd sit down and do a reading, and I didn't know a lot of the words, and I was so unsophisticated. I remember to this day some of the words I stumbled on, like "mundane" -- I didn't know what that word was. And "symbiotic," I didn't know what it was. Everybody got such a big kick out of me, 'cause I was 17, sort of out there. And when they laughed, it deeply affected me, because I was so used to humiliation. It was what I lived with, the threat that humiliation would come toward me in the form of my stepfather. So when we'd sit at the table and they'd laugh, it would be my trigger. I'd be like, "Oh, my God!" And he somehow -- he couldn't have known -- but he would sit next to me, and he would whisper the word to me before a word would come up. It could be something simple. It could be like, he would whisper it to me. It was truly one of the most loving things from a man that had happened to me to that point.

He was a likable father on the show as well.

Sally Field: When you do things like a television series, which is so relentless, a lot of what you see is the reality of what's happening. I learned that a lot of that can't be acted. A lot of that chemistry is because it is real.

The Flying Nun was your next role. Can you talk about playing The Flying Nun?

Sally Field: Well that's an interesting journey. I didn't want to do it.

Gidget stopped sort of prematurely oddly, and I didn't have enough connection with my own voice to know that I needed to go and study and become what I wanted to become.

I didn't know how to do that yet. I was 19, and I kept turning it down.

I didn't want to be a nun. I, I was a burgeoning young woman. It was the '60s. Everyone was running around naked! I didn't want to do that, but I didn't want to be a nun at all!

I didn't like it. I didn't want to be this silly thing.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I turned it down. It took great strength. I was already living on my own, in an apartment by myself down the road and not that far away, and I said, "No, no, I don't want to do that. I don't want to do that." You know, now, very brave of me. I'm going to find something else I want to do. And my stepfather came over to my apartment one time and told me -- and I subsequently realized it was because the producer, Harry Ackerman, had called him to do it, so I felt betrayed ultimately. He'd said that I should do it because I may never work again. I mean those were like...I didn't know it then. I should've burst out laughing because that's like the cliché in the town. You know, like, "Shall we lunch?" you know. It's like a cliché, "You'll never work again." But, I was too young to know that I should've laughed. Instead I got scared. And I thought, "God, really?" and called them up and said, "I guess I should do this." They were already filming the pilot with somebody else and they fired her, and they put me in the next day and there it was. And I was really unhappy for all three years that I did it because a part of me knew why. I had listened to a voice of fear. It changed my life. It changed my life. I knew then that that voice of fear was something that I must never listen to -- fear of that. I must go to what desperately frightens me. [What] desperately frightens me is the chance of failure, is the chance of not knowing. But not going to what is safe, and that's what my stepfather had urged me to do. And I tried to learn that.

[ Key to Success ] Courage

As an actress, did The Flying Nun give you some, a setback in a way, you were inclined to be typecast?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Sally Field: Well, you know, ultimately you look at these things. You look at these paths and these journeys you go on, and I think it's up to you to find the value in them, 'cause there is value in all of them, even those that you would call, "Godsh, I shouldn't have done that. I should've done that, I need to do that." I did that, and I was there for three years. And it was an invaluable education. It was not a very glamorous one. It was a successful one, in that the show was successful for three years. It would've gone on, had I not begun to drag my feet so terribly and, you know, every night wish it ill. But what it did for me -- besides learning a kind of facility with the craft of stepping in front of a camera, of learning dialogue, a facility that I didn't have yet -- is that I met Madeleine Sherwood, who was the actress who played Mother Superior. And I was so desperately unhappy. She said, "Come with me." And at the end of the first year of The Flying Nun, she took me to the Actor's Studio to meet Lee Strasberg, and that was a monumental change in my life. From then on, I would work in the daytime, in between The Flying Nun, and at night I would be at the Actor's Studio in L.A., because Lee Strasberg would be, six months out of the year in L.A. I would be doing just outrageous material that I still didn't quite understand. I was doing Sartre's Respectful Prostitute, or whatever I could do that I thought was completely outside of what The Flying Nun was. But ultimately, I worked with Lee on and off for about ten years. And ultimately I learned a craft. I learned to hear my voice of what I really wanted to do. And finally, when I was given the opportunity to do the work, I really knew how to do it.

[ Key to Success ] Preparation

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