Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
More On:
Sally Field
-
R.I.P. Ángel Salazar: ‘Scarface’ Actor Dead At 68
-
Sally Field Recalls Touching Gesture From Robin Williams On ‘Mrs. Doubtfire’ Set: “He Was Very Sensitive And Intuitive”
-
How ‘The Stunt Man’ and ‘Hooper’ Set The Standard For ‘The Fall Guy’ (The TV Show And The Movie)
-
‘The View’s Ana Navarro Says Sally Field’s Oscars Success Was “Probably Very Difficult” For Ex-Boyfriend Burt Reynolds: “His Ego Couldn’t Take It”
On what would become one of the biggest nights of her life, actress Sally Field was missing one important person: her then-boyfriend Burt Reynolds.
In Dave Karger’s upcoming book 50 Oscar Nights, Field recalls the 52nd Academy Awards ceremony, which took place in 1980. According to her, Reynolds, whom she was dating at the time, “was not happy” with all the attention she was getting for her leading role in Norma Rae.
“He did not want me to go to Cannes [Film Festival] at all,” Field says in the book, per People. “He said, ‘You don’t think you’re going to win anything, do you?'”
She adds, “When the Oscars came around, he really was not a nice guy around me then and was not going to go with me.”
Fortunately, Field did not have to attend the event completely dateless. While she “didn’t know what to do” when Reynolds declined to be her plus-one, actor and comedian David Steinberg and his then-wife Judy were there to celebrate the star’s first Academy Award win for Best Actress.
“David said, ‘Well, for God’s sakes, we’ll take you,'” Field remembers in the book. “He and Judy made it a big celebration. They picked me up in a limousine and had champagne in the car. They made it just wonderful fun.”
Field and Reynolds first met while filming the 1977 action comedy Smokey and the Bandit, which was one of four movies they co-starred in. They went on to date for five years before officially calling it quits in 1982.
In his 2015 memoir But Enough About Me, Reynolds wrote that he regretted how things ended with the actress — and later called her the “love of my life” in an interview with Vanity Fair.
However, Field said she hadn’t spoken to him in 30 years before he died in 2018.
“He was not someone I could be around,” she told Variety in 2022. “He was just not good for me in any way. And he had somehow invented in his rethinking of everything that I was more important to him than he had thought, but I wasn’t. He just wanted to have the thing he didn’t have. I just didn’t want to deal with that.”
