It was nearly 50 years ago, but Sally Field still remembers when she realized her relationship with Burt Reynolds was coming to a close. Field, who is starring in Netflix’s “Remarkably Bright Creatures,” discussed how the late “Cannonball Run” star became overly controlling when he didn’t approve of the subject matter of the drama “Norma Rae,” for which she won the best actress Oscar.
“It was the beginning of me pulling away when he didn’t want me to do ‘Norma Rae’, called her a whore, and it was because she had some sexual past. He threw the script at me,” Field told People magazine. “He wanted to control me, and because I was standing up, he said, ‘Boy, you’re letting this get the better of you.’ And I said, ‘This is the better of me.’ And I went and I met with [director] Marty Ritt. I did the film. But it was the beginning of me finding my legs.”
Field went on to say that not only did he discourage her from attending the premiere of “Norma Rae” at the Cannes Film Festival, but he even refused to attend the Oscars. The two split up for good in 1982.
“Being Norma at that time was exactly what I needed, because to learn how to stand in her shoes, I think I said this [in her 2018 memoir In Pieces], I could feel my own legs,” Field told People magazine. “I could feel my body getting stronger. Because I was having to portray how she grew up, I started to grow up, and I eventually just wouldn’t be manipulated and humiliated like that. And ultimately I left.”
Field and Reynolds were together off and on for five years, during which time they made four movies together. But the “Places in the Heart” star says that in her opinion, the only one that really counted was “Smokey and the Bandit,” the first one in which they appeared together. They went on to make the “Smokey” sequel in 1980 and two films in 1978, “Hooper” and “The End.”
“The others that I was in, I was just a girl,” she told People. “I just was stuck there because I was sort of stuck altogether. And it was a very complicated relationship.”
The two met after Field made her comeback on TV with “Sybil” after a slow period that occurred in the wake of her hit sitcom “The Flying Nun.”
“Remarkably Bright Creatures,” about a widow who bonds with an octopus at an aquarium, begins streaming on Netflix Friday.