The only thing the population can begin to do to a woman by the time she has spent decades on large and small screens is to treat her face as a group project. The late 70s of Sally Field have come with all that familiar sound of the drive-by judgement of her gray hair and her skin and whether she should make more effort to appear “better”. Field has not taken the steps to live up to those expectations and she has not provided that choice as boldness or a declaration. She has treated it as normal.
The career of Field was never based on staying in a frozen age. Even before she came to be used as a shorthand to describe emotionally strong characters, she came in as the light head of Gidget in the 1960s and then played a high-visibility strangeness of The Flying Nun, which she later called restrictive. The turn that occurred next, to a more layered, more risky work, assisted in redefining the way the audience and the industry perceived her.
The change can best be observed in the projects that requested her to be uncompromising. The role she played in Sybil showed she was able to retain complex content. Then Norma Rae was itself an icon: she became an Academy Award winner, and the film remained so bright that even details of the work behind the scenes became a part of her legend, such as that she broke the rib of one actor during a filmed struggle. As the years passed, she appeared in a series of movies that were not only cultural hits, like Steel Magnolias, Mrs. Doubtfire, Forrest Gump, but did not reduce to one-dimensional.
Offscreen, Field has also demanded control over her story not letting the world sanction the editing. In Pieces in 2018, her memoir, she revealed her abuse by her stepfather, which redefined her personality about enduring and being very frank rather than elegant to her audience. The same down-to-earth accent appears when she addresses aging: she has still recognized how it feels to see herself on a camera and to see each and every change, but has not accepted the notion that those changes are disqualifying.
The thing that most critics will always leave out in their commentary is that Field, has also had to cope with a long-term health reality. She has osteoporosis since 2005, a disease often referred to as a “silent disease” since a lot of bone loss can be experienced before one notices it. Field has talked of the discovery of her fitting typical risk factors, such as a small frame, and the diagnosis was delivered right before she reached 60. The larger picture is important: after menopause, the risk of women increases even more because hormonal changes promote bone loss, thus prevention and early screening becomes a key aspect of healthy aging of many individuals.
It is also just the question of the treatment of aging women in entertainment. Field has given the experience a straightforward account. In an episode of the Julia Louise Dreyfus podcast Wiser Than Me, she declared ageism in Hollywood horrible, and the fact that fewer and fewer significant parts are given to women once they are older, including non-romantic-centric storylines.
Field has claimed she has put an end to people-pleasing, and the change is reflected in minor decisions that are articulated in a youth-crazed society.
She has also been regular regarding cosmetic work. Field has consistently stated that she has no intentions to undergo plastic surgery despite acknowledging that she can see what she would like to change. And I do not like my neck, I do not like most of things but it is all right, it is all right. I have value, at the age behind my years, so to speak, I told NPR. The feeling is neither refusal nor act a mere insistence that self-esteem should be able to live to maturity.
When an industry is known to reward women with the ability to make time disappear, Field has been adamantly practical: continue working, continue telling the truth, and allow a face to reflect a life that brought it there.
