Sally Field has revealed the painful truth behind her decades-long relationship with Burt Reynolds, describing a romance built on love and passion but also marked by control, drug use, and a pattern of behavior rooted in childhood abuse. In her 2018 memoir “In Pieces,” the two-time Oscar winner detailed for the first time how the man she called the love of her life also became the person who made her feel she had to disappear. Field was born on November 6, 1946, in Pasadena, California, to actress Margaret Field and Richard Dryden Field. Her parents divorced when she was four, and her mother later remarried Hollywood stuntman Jock Mahoney.
Field has said the abuse from Mahoney began when she was five years old and continued until she was fourteen, leaving wounds that shaped how she saw herself and how she loved for decades afterward. Acting became her escape. She attended Birmingham High School in Van Nuys, then enrolled in a summer acting workshop at Columbia Studios, where a casting agent spotted her. Chosen from over 75 other young actresses, she landed the title role in “Gidget” at just 17 years old.
The show lasted only one season, but it opened the door. She followed with “The Flying Nun,” a role she later admitted embarrassed her, but it kept her working and visible. Determined to be taken seriously, she studied for two years at the Actors Studio under Lee Strasberg. The transformation was immediate.
In 1976, she starred in the television film “Sybil,” playing a woman with 16 distinct personalities, a performance that won her an Emmy and forced Hollywood to see her differently. Then came the phone call that changed everything. In 1977, Burt Reynolds wanted Sally Field for “Smokey and the Bandit. ” At the time, Reynolds was the biggest movie star in America, the top box office draw for five straight years.
He told her he had loved her in “Gidget” and wanted her beside him for the whole film. The chemistry was instantaneous and intense. They had known each other only three or four days, Field said, but it felt like four years. The film became a massive hit, grossing over $300 million worldwide on a budget of barely $4 million.
Off screen, they fell into each other. But the relationship that followed was far more complicated than the image the public saw. Field wrote in her memoir that from the moment she walked through the door, Reynolds’s stardom became a way to control her too. She described falling into a pre-programmed behavior rooted so deep in her childhood that she could not see it happening.
She had grown up learning that to be loved, you had to disappear, and so she disappeared. She dressed for Burt, looked for him, walked for him. She has said plainly that she stopped existing during those years. Even in the early months on set, she encountered his drug use firsthand.
He was taking Percodan, Valium, and barbiturates to manage whatever was raging inside him. She found herself handing him pills while he drove cars down narrow roads at full speed. Still, she stayed because the connection between them was real. There was love in it and passion, even if the shape that care took was sometimes painful to carry.
In 1979, a turning point came. Field was offered the starring role in “Norma Rae,” the story of a cotton mill worker who becomes a union organizer. She knew immediately she had to do it, but Reynolds did not want her to take the role. He told her point-blank that no lady of his was going to play a union organizer.
When she tried to explain it was acting, he told her she was letting her ambition get the better of her. He also tried to convince her to skip the Cannes Film Festival when the film was selected to premiere there, asking her if she really thought she was going to win anything. Field went anyway and won Best Actress. On the final day of filming “Norma Rae,” Reynolds showed up on set and got down on one knee with a diamond ring.
Field described the proposal as feeling completely wrong, and she did not accept. When the Academy Award nominations were announced, Reynolds refused to accompany her to the ceremony. Field went with actor David Steinberg and his wife, and she accepted her first Oscar for “Norma Rae” without Reynolds anywhere in the building. She has said that moment told her everything she needed to know, even if she was not quite ready to act on it yet.
Field has spoken about how her childhood prepared her for exactly this kind of dynamic. She grew up learning that love came with conditions, that the man in the house could be magical and frightening all at once. She said she was somehow exercising something that needed to be exercised, trying to make it work this time, and Burt was the arena in which she tried to do it. They co-starred in four films together: “Smokey and the Bandit,” “Hooper,” “The End,” and “Smokey and the Bandit II.
” Reynolds proposed multiple times over the years, and Field never said yes. She knew his heart was not truly in it the way it needed to be, and that if they had married, they would have ended up feeling terrible. By 1980, the relationship had officially ended, though they drifted back toward each other on and off until 1982, when the break became permanent. Field learned about his infidelities through tabloids and newspaper clippings that her grandmother mailed to her, clippings of Burt with other women.
She has said part of her knew it was all true, and she felt duped and a fool. The release of that relationship freed something inside her. In 1984, she returned to the Oscar stage for a second time, winning Best Actress for “Places in the Heart. ” This time, her speech included the words that echoed through pop culture ever since: “You like me.
You really like me. ” For anyone who understood what Field had been through, it was more honest than a punchline: a woman who had spent her whole life feeling she had to shrink herself to be loved finally hearing that the world liked exactly who she was. That same year, she married producer Alan Greisman, and they had one son together, Samuel, born in 1987. The marriage lasted ten years before they divorced in 1994.
By then, Field had become one of the most versatile actresses in Hollywood, appearing in “Steel Magnolias” in 1989, “Mrs. Doubtfire” in 1993, and “Forrest Gump” in 1994, where she played Tom Hanks’s mother across the span of one man’s whole life. Reynolds, meanwhile, married actress Loni Anderson in 1988. That marriage fell apart amid allegations of physical abuse and drug use on both sides, and they divorced in 1994, the same year Field and Greisman parted ways.
In later years, Reynolds repeatedly called Field the love of his life. In his 2015 memoir and in interview after interview, he said losing her was the biggest mistake of his life. “Even now, it’s hard on me,” he told Vanity Fair. “I don’t know why I was so stupid.
Men are like that, you know. You find the perfect person and then you do everything you can to screw it up. ”
Field has never quite seen their story the same way. She was always touched when he said those things, but she has been honest about the fact that she believed he had reinvented their relationship in his own memory over the decades, turning her into something she may not have been because he wanted the thing he didn’t have.
She had not spoken to him for the last 30 years of his life, and she knew the distance was the right thing even when the nostalgia hurt. On September 6, 2018, Reynolds died of a heart attack at a hospital in Florida. He was 82 years old. Twelve days later, on September 18, Field’s memoir “In Pieces” arrived on bookstore shelves.
The book she had spent six years writing, in which she laid bare everything about her childhood, the abuse, the patterns she fell into, and Burt, landed in the world just days after he left it. Field told The New York Times that she had felt glad in those first moments after hearing about his death, glad that he wasn’t going to read it, wasn’t going to be asked about it, and wasn’t going to have to defend himself or lash out. “I did not want to hurt him any further,” she said. She also released a statement with words as honest as anything she has ever said: “There are times in your life that are so indelible, they never fade away.
They stay alive even 40 years later. My years with Burt never leave my mind. He will be in my history and my heart for as long as I live. Rest, buddy.
”
That one word, buddy, his childhood nickname, said more than any long speech could have done. It told you that underneath all of it, underneath the pain and the control and the years of silence, something had been real between them. Field has continued working with a commitment that shows acting was never just a career for her. She earned a Tony Award nomination on Broadway for her performance in a revival of Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie” in 2017.
She received the Kennedy Center Honor in 2019 and the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award in 2023. Burt Reynolds died still regretting Sally Field. Sally Field survived him with the quiet grace that only comes from having done the hard internal work of understanding where your wounds come from and choosing to walk forward anyway. Their story is not a fairy tale.
It never was. It is something more complicated and more true than that.
