10 THINGS YOU DON’T KNOW ABOUT
MORE than 50 years after Sally Field made her debut as a boy-crazy surfer in TV’s Gidget, she’s still riding a wave of popularity. Though she got her start on sitcoms, the Flying Nun successfully landed two Oscar-winning roles, in 1979’s Norma Rae and 1984’s Places in the Heart. Her latest movie is the rom-com tearjerker Spoiler Alert, which sees her playing the mom of a man with terminal cancer. Here are ten things you don’t know about the 76-year-old Pasadena native.
1
She claims upon her birth, the doctor told her mom — Man from Planet X starlet Margaret Field — “Congratulations, you have an actor!”
2
She was a cheerleader at California’s Birmingham
High School and was a classmate of future Laverne & Shirley star Cindy Williams.
3
Her fellow graduates voted her class clown.
4
Early in her career, she fired an agent who wanted her to stick to TV and told her she wasn’t “pretty enough” for the silver screen.
5
She’s name-checked in the theme song to the ABC action series The Fall Guy, which ran from 1981 to 1986 and starred Lee Majors.
6
She was director Norman Jewison’s first choice to play leading lady Loretta in Moonstruck, but she passed on the role, which won Cher an Academy Award.
7
As rabble-rousing union organizer Norma Rae Webster, she accidentally broke the rib of a castmate playing a cop — and sprained the wrist of another.
8
In 1988, TV mogul Merv Griffin loaned her his private jet, but it was forced to abort its takeoff and crashed into two parked planes in Colorado. She escaped the wreckage uninjured.
9
She played matchmaker on Twitter in 2018 by attempting to set up son Samuel Greisman with his Olympic figure skater crush, Adam Rippon — but failed to score a love match.
10
She says her worst onscreen smooch came from Tommy Lee Jones in Back Roads — but her best was delivered by Murphy’s Romance co-star
James Garner.