Sally Field

Sally Field's first job of consequence was the lead in Gidget, which began in 1965 and lasted a single season. The Flying Nun followed in 1967 and ran for three, and it did her a specific kind of damage: it made her nationally familiar as a novelty rather than as an actress. Six years passed between the end of that series and the part that corrected the record, which is a long time to spend being recognised in the street for the wrong reason. American television comedy in that period led nowhere in particular.

Sybil, a television film about a woman with a dissociative disorder, went out in 1976 and won her a Primetime Emmy the following year. Smokey and the Bandit in 1977 kept her commercially useful while she looked for the next serious thing, and in 1979 Martin Ritt gave it to her. Norma Rae is about a textile worker who organises her mill, and it won Field the Best Actress prize at Cannes in 1979 and the Academy Award the following spring. Two years, three pieces of hardware.

Places in the Heart came in 1984, with Field as a widow in Depression-era Texas trying to bring in a cotton crop, and it won her a second Best Actress award at the ceremony in March 1985. What survives from that night is a sentence she has spent forty years explaining. She said she could not deny that the Academy liked her, right now, it liked her - which was mocked for decades as a display of neediness, and reads now as an accurate account of what two decades of being condescended to does to a person.

Field kept going in a way that makes the then-and-now framing almost useless. Steel Magnolias in 1989, Mrs. Doubtfire in 1993, Forrest Gump in 1994 as the mother of a man ten years her junior - a piece of casting she has commented on drily ever since. A third Oscar nomination for Lincoln in 2013. Emmys in 2001 and 2007. The Kennedy Center Honors in 2019, a Screen Actors Guild life achievement award in 2023, and in September 2026, at seventy-nine, a fourth Emmy and the record for the oldest winner in that category.