Sally Field says her relationship with Burt Reynolds was both loving and frightening, a complicated bond that she says stretched across five years and helped shape the way she understood control, work and walking away. Recalling their time together while discussing her new film with Jim Parsons, Spoiler Alert, Field said Reynolds could be “so wonderful and lovable” and also “really frightening.”
“It was a very complicated relationship,” Field said. She said Reynolds was “very much like my stepfather,” adding that her stepfather taught her that “love is wonderful and dangerous.” Field said she loved Reynolds “to pieces,” but also said he wanted to control her work and could hurt and humiliate her.
Field and Reynolds met on the set of Smokey and the Bandit in 1977 and were in an on-and-off relationship from 1977 to 1982. They also starred together in Hooper in 1978, after Smokey and the Bandit became a hit the year before. Reynolds later married Loni Anderson in 1988, and that marriage ended in 1994. He died in 2018 at 82.
Field said the turning point came with Norma Rae, which she described as the beginning of her pulling away from Reynolds. She said he did not want her to do the film and called the title character a whore because she had a sexual past. “He threw the script at me because I was standing up,” Field said, recalling how she went to meet director Martin Ritt and decided to do the movie anyway.
“I eventually could stand up to Burt and I could eventually walk away,” Field said. “I did the film, but it was the beginning of me finding my legs.” That, in the end, is the answer in her recollection of Reynolds: the relationship was real, the damage was real, and Norma Rae was where she began to break free.
