Sally Field has enjoyed one of the most successful careers a Hollywood actress could possibly have. She's won two Academy Awards, three Primetime Emmy Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, and a Screen Actors Guild Award, and has been nominated for a Tony Award and two BAFTA Awards. Not bad for a performer most people in the 1960s considered to be an airhead sitcom star.
In this 2016 interview with Howard Stern, Sally Field looks back on the time her motion picture career took off, specifically her take on Smokey and The Bandit, a 1977 role that made her a huge movie star.
Previous to Smokey, Field won rave reviews for her performance as Sybil but, as Howard points out, it may have left people with the impression that the former Gidget and Flying Nun star was, in fact, as crazy as Sybil. That's how riveting a performance it was.
So it was a bold career move to follow Sybil with a lighthearted romantic comedy, Smokey and The Bandit.
Surprisingly, most of the dialogue in Smokey, was improvised, "I thought maybe I should do it because it wasn't a script," Field said. "I didn't know Burt and we all just said, 'Let's just ad lib our way through this thing.'"
She was unsure as to how the motion picture would affect her career. "I just thought it was the end of everything that I had worked so hard to achieve," Field says. Why then did she take the movie? "There's just a part of me that, something I respond to and go, that I think, 'Okay, let's just jump off the cliff.' It wasn't careful, it wasn't carefully thought out and I thought, it was film, it wasn't.. television. It thrust me back on the screen in film. It had taken me so long to get to film and it was with Burt who was, you know, a huge star. So charming and funny."
There was also a desire on her part to work with director Hal Needham who was one of Hollywood's top stunt coordinators. "That's all he did, figure out how to make those stunts work, have the people be safe, and have them be funny."
The Hollywood Reporter review in 1977 stated: "Reynolds performs with an offhand, easy style and he creates an engaging character that should please his many fans. The script requires little from any of the actors, but they all give personable performances. Field is well-cast as the kookie dancer, Reed is fine as Reynolds' sidekick and Pat McCormick and Paul Williams appear as the incongruous father-and-son team who challenge Reynolds. Gleason has plenty of opportunity to clown around, but much of the time he seems to be doing a prissy Zero Mostel imitation and he too often forces the exaggeration."
Sally Field followed Smokey and The Bandit with Norma Rae, a groundbreaking, career changing dramatic role for which she won the Oscar for Best Actress.
